Mumbai, Oct. 9 -- Fintechs in India have a clear mandate from the head of the country's central bank: design products that are accessible, inclusive, and tailored for underserved populations. Speaking at the Global Fintech Fest 2025 in Mumbai on Wednesday, Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor Sanjay Malhotra urged fintechs to ensure that no segment is left behind even as serving affluent customers remains lucrative. "Design products and services that are easy to use, accessible for all, with assistive technologies, ensuring that vulnerable groups such as senior citizens, individuals with limited digital literacy and the specially abled are not left behind," Malhotra said. He called on fintechs to bridge digital divides, foster competition, and innovate while thinking global but anchoring local. "Engage with international partners, share learnings, adopt global best practices and strengthen India's role in shaping the future of digital finance," he said. Malhotra framed this as part of India's next phase of digital financial growth-moving beyond building access to universalizing services and deepening impact by using data responsibly. "Some work has been done by us in these areas, more needs to be done," he said. This includes aggregation and leveraging of financial data through the development of the digital rupee, asset tokenization, artificial intelligence and the account aggregator framework. "RBI is in the process of introducing standards designed to improve customer onboarding processes, enhance user interfaces, strengthen data security, and increase transparency and awareness in consent management and data sharing under the account aggregator framework," he said. He added that the success of this will, however, depend on interoperability between financial platforms and expansion in delivery of credit through the Unified Lending Interface (ULI) platform. "The foundation of digital public infrastructure (DPI) has allowed these fintechs to set up quickly and to scale rapidly and deliver targeted solutions to not only address current but also future challenges," Malhotra said. He added that India is home to over 10,000 fintechs aided by the large and deep pool of skilled talent, a vibrant financial ecosystem, and enabling government policies and regulatory frameworks. The governor highlighted how India's digital public infrastructure-from Aadhaar-based identity and UPI (unified payments interface) payments to digitized government data-allows fintechs to scale rapidly and deliver targeted solutions. He added that the central bank has chosen to keep fintechs out of the purview of the regulatory space so far given the diversity of companies in the sector. However, it has recognized a self-regulatory organisation to enable the fintechs to adopt baseline governance standards and best practices. On Wednesday, the RBI chief announced the introduction of asset tokenisation, which he said will open up new possibilities for Indian financial markets by expanding access, improving transparency....