Moneycontrol Pro Panorama | DPI, UPI, AI and finding a tech Neverland

AI is making it easier to monitor fintech transactions, improve the customer interface and meet know-your-customer (KYC) rules.

Dear Reader,

The Panorama newsletter is sent to Moneycontrol Pro subscribers on market days. It offers easy access to stories published on Moneycontrol Pro and gives a little extra by setting out a context or an event or trend that investors should keep track of. Today’s technology was yesterday’s fantasy.  

For the quintessential boomers (a label for elderly people born before 1950s), the technology surrounding their lives today resembles the disorientation after an unintended afternoon nap. Try as you might, you never quite know where you are for the first few seconds after waking up. For the rest of us, technology has become more of a ticket to convenience with our mobile phones an extension of our hands.  

While tech has many dimensions, the one where it meets finance (fintech) has the capacity to bring about massive and long-lasting change as also enough damage if unchecked and unregulated. After all, a button or a swipe that could move cash from your wallet to someone else’s within seconds is changing everything from consumption habits to how we view money. India’s success with a state-pushed Unified Payment Interface (UPI) that has altered the payment landscape is not overstated. More than 10 billion transactions were processed by the nimble payment system in August, an all-time high. The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has emerged as the crown jewel among fintechs as my colleague Anand J puts it in this piece. UPI is going global even as it is being constantly innovated upon.  

While we scan and pay towards fulfilling all our desires, perhaps boomers find ‘’talking to UPI” easier with voice enabled payments now available. Basking in this success is alright, but getting a payment system or for that matter the entire fintech ecosystem a “safe tag” is critical. India is pushing a Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) at the G20 platform where it wants countries to make tech infrastructure interoperable with cooperation. Sounds grand at a time when global cooperation is perhaps at a low point. Both the US and China cannot see eye-to-eye on almost every aspect, one of which is technology. The Apple-Huawei battle where the US is reportedly investigating Huawei manufactured chips and China is said to have banned iPhone uses by government officials shows how technology is a key battleground. 

The G20 needs to ensure cooperation among countries for a digital economy and its Digital Economy Working Group has its task cut out. India is at the centre of this, but there is a missing piece. We come back to the safe tag for anything digital. The security accidents with Aadhaar or payment scams that are rising do not show India in a good light. DPI would need security at global scale as accidents won’t be local anymore. As Amol Hatwar puts in his piece on the DPI push, “For interconnected DPI across borders, any chink in the armour will lead to damages on a global scale,” referring to cyberattacks.  

Without the guarantee of secure transactions, a digital economy is a sitting duck for destruction. The efforts for a secure and protected digital infrastructure must pace up as Artificial Intelligence (AI) makes its way into our lives. AI is making it easier to monitor fintech transactions, improve the customer interface and meet know-your-customer (KYC) rules. Generative AI is already thinking for us. But is it safe to outsource our thinking to a system lacking human values? Unless countries sponsoring and using tech answer this question, the goal of seamless tech-enabled convenience sitting on global cooperation would only be a tech Neverland.

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Aparna Iyer
Moneycontrol Pro