Nandan Nilekani-led Finternet use cases to go live in 2026

Infosys Co-founder Nandan Nilekani’s next digital public infrastructure (DPI) innovation ‘Finternet’ will go live in 2026 with business use cases across sectors and countries, he said at the Global Fintech Fest 2025 in Mumbai.

Nilekani defines Finternet as a unified approach to finance. One of the core innovations with Finternet will be to tokenise all kinds of asset classes be it a registered land, a regulated financial product, bonds, deposits – that can be accessed over a universal infrastructure which will be secure and regulated.

“This is an idea which is going global, whether it's in India, Singapore, New York, San Francisco, or in Switzerland. You can see the gradual expansion of what's happening, and we think, in 2026, we will be live,” he said.

Nilekani added, “Next year, we will have live examples of Finternet in multiple sectors, in multiple countries, actually delivering value, and the business models and commercial models will emerge. So people are going to build great companies on that.”

Nilekani and his team first introduced the concept of Finternet at GFF in 2024. As of 2025, this has grown dramatically to create a network 10 cohorts in eight sectors, 30 ecosystem partners, operating across four continents, he shared.

According to him, Finternet will be the next phase of DPI as it will help unlock value of people’s traditional assets such as real estate and gold through tokenisation as one of the use cases.

“We have trillions of dollars of assets that are locked in real estate and gold. We have to find a way to unlock that…We think tokenisation and AI will catalyze this change. That in the coming years, two important trends will happen. The trend of tokenization and the trend of AI,” he said.

Nilekani along with Finternet Labs CEO Siddharth Shetty demoed a couple of these use cases at the event including letting users invest in a part of real estate or land parcel by tokenising it, or making buying a property as quick as paying through UPI by creating a connected network and a virtual profile of a buyer’s identity documents and bank details.