Date: October 7, 2025
Mumbai hosted the sixth Global Fintech Fest in early October, drawing more than 100,000 delegates from over 100 countries under the theme “Empowering Finance for a Better World Powered by AI.” The event showcased AI-driven payments, tokenized digital infrastructure pilots, open finance initiatives and conversational commerce payment experiments. Startups presented cross-border payment solutions aimed at reducing remittance costs for migrant workers while incumbents highlighted regulatory sandboxes and interoperability frameworks. Policymakers discussed the need to balance innovation with consumer protection and data privacy. Observers noted that India’s combination of large digital public goods (Aadhaar, UPI), a deep payments ecosystem and a growing fintech talent pool positions it as a credible global hub for digital finance. The festival concluded with calls for enhanced public-private collaboration to scale pilots into mainstream services and to export fintech solutions regionally.