Nandan Nilekani gives a glimpse of the next decade of India’s ‘Finternet’

Nandan Nilekani, co-founder and chairman of Infosys

Tokenisation of real-world assets, smart contracts enabled by mainstream banks and regulated by the government – Infosys co-founder and chairman Nandan Nilekani gave a sneak peek into the future of India’s fintech landscape through the next decade.

Nilekani called this idea ‘Finternet’, which will be a user-centric, unified and universal approach to finance. He was speaking at the Global Fintech Fest (GFF) in Mumbai on August 28.

The underlining concept, Nilekani explained, will be to bring together all kinds of asset classes be it a registered land, a regulated financial product, bonds, deposits, horses or even paintings – allowing them to be tokenised – and accessed over a universal infrastructure which will be secure and regulated.

“Finternet is a new approach to global finance, which is defined with three U's. It is user-centric. It puts the user at the heart of what we want to solve because users want more control over their lives, over their assets, over their destiny. It has to be unified, which means that it should cut across all asset classes…And, you need a universal infrastructure on which all of this works. We underestimate the value of universal infrastructure,” Nilekani said.

He added, “We want to have something which allows everyone to participate and control all kinds of assets. User-controlled assets, user content, NFTs (non-fungible tokens), adjusted assets which are certified by somebody, registered assets like land, or regulated assets like financial products. All of them should be able to participate in this economy. We need a good way of protecting them from the downsides.”

Nilekani and his team also gave a demo of what this tokenised future of assets and the banking ecosystem will look like.

He explained that with tokens or tokenisations, people can have self-described, self-contained packets that will have all the attributes of the asset getting tokenised.

“Here instead of a paper file, we have a token packet. Now, why is this possible? Because of advances in cryptography. Cryptography allows you immutability. It means you cannot change. You can make sure nobody can change that packet using a blockchain. It's verifiable. It has security. And, it has privacy,” he said.

Nilekani along with Pramod Varma, Siddharth Shetty and Agustin Carstens and the team at BIS (Bank for International Settlements) had released a white paper detailing the same in April 2024.