Tech3 | FM Sitharaman bats for global collaboration in fintech; PoS race heats up; and more

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In today’s newsletter:

• FM Sitharaman bats for global collaboration in fintech?
• Pine Labs, Paytm heat up POS race
• 25,000 delivery workers to bear brunt of G20 Summit

FM Sitharaman bats for global collaboration in fintech

A Coachella-like presence at the Global Fintech Fest (GFF)? Almost! More than 50,000 people attended the first day of the three-day event in Mumbai. But here's a quick rundown to catch up!

FM Speak: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said today that maintaining global collaboration and investing in security systems are just as important as investing in innovation for fintech startups.

"Global collaboration in the fintech world is the keyword. We are living in a dynamic and robust world that is facing a lot of challenges. Global collaboration is a must whether on economic or financial ecosystem," Sitharaman said.

The government and the industry are in agreement on the importance of compliance and security.?

• As Harshil Mathur, the Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of Razorpay, said at the event, fintech companies should learn to comply with regulations early on, as it becomes increasingly difficult to do so later.

The AI bug bites SEBI too: The markets regulator is considering using artificial intelligence (AI) to customise and regulate risk management for different entities.

“AI will give us the ability to move from risk-based supervision to risk-based regulation to segmented regulation to a granular-level regulation, which will make life a lot easier for all regulated entities,” said Madhabi Puri Buch, Chairperson of Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI)

Meanwhile, SEBI is also planning to introduce one-hour trade settlements, followed by instantaneous settlements. It is worth noting that Indian stock exchanges moved to a T+1 (trade-plus-one) settlement cycle in January. Market sources said that it is likely to be implemented by March 2024.

UPI’s next milestone: UPI, which crossed 10 billion transactions in a month for the first time in August, is now aiming for 2 billion transactions per day by 2030, fueled by the growth of credit on the platform.

“...with the fintechs getting involved -- I think 10x growth in the users on the credit side, and it is not very ambitious. And at least 50% of the top 30 markets or countries will have pipes with UPI for cross-border transactions,” said Dilip Asbe, CEO of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).

Asbe is also advocating for a pure digital version of credit cards. For this, NPCI is working closely with all major lenders, such as HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, and SBI Card.

More from our GFF coverage?

• Fintech innovations will not change basic nature of financial system: RBI DG T. Rabi Sankar

• UPI123 Pay to help achieve 100 bn monthly transactions, says RBI official

• YONO is becoming a digital bank within a bank, says SBI Chairman

• Vijay Shekhar Sharma says if he didn't launch Paytm, he would have started an EV business

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