Reserve Bank of India Deputy Governor Shirish Chandra Murmu addresses "Trusted Innovation: Shaping the Future of Finance" at the Global Fintech Festival 2026 at Jio World Convention Centre, Bandra Kurla Complex, in Mumbai on Friday.
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UPI’s success in becoming integral to commerce and daily life creates new responsibilities, including dealing with situations where an outage or a security incident can have consequences far beyond an individual transaction, cautioned RBI Deputy Governor Shirish Chandra Murmu. “Unified Payments Interface [UPI] illustrates both the achievement and the responsibility that come with scale. In FY 2025-26, it processed about 24,162 crore transactions worth about ₹314 lakh crore — around 85 per cent of India’s digital payment transactions by volume,” Murmu said at the Global Fintech Festival.Further, India today accounts for close to half of the world’s real-time payment transactions, and by daily count UPI rivals the largest global card networks — though not on a like-for-like basis, as it also carries person-to-person transfers and those networks do not process. This is an extraordinary achievement.“Scale changes the nature of risk. Four issues — operational resilience, cyber resilience, fraud prevention and customer protection follow,” the Deputy Governor said.He noted that payment systems operate 24x7x365, and institutions must design for stress, not only for normal operations. Redundancy, business continuity, incident response and recovery must be built into the architecture and its governance — and disruptions must be communicated to customers promptly and honestly.Murmu said cybersecurity is no longer merely an IT issue; it is an enterprise-wide and increasingly ecosystem-wide risk, in which vulnerabilities in one participant can affect many others, and it must be built proactively rather than reconstructed after an incident. The exclusive “.bank.in” domain for banks is one measure intended to strengthen this foundation and help customers distinguish genuine banking websites from fraudulent ones.The Deputy Governor observed that social engineering, account takeovers, mule accounts and technology-enabled scams show that security is about protecting both the transaction infrastructure and the customer’s interaction with it. Institutions must be able to distinguish an informed payment from one produced by manipulation.“Fraud must increasingly be treated as an ecosystem problem, requiring cooperation across banks, payment system operators, fintechs , telecom providers and law enforcement,” he said.Digital Payments Intelligence PlatformThe RBI is accordingly developing the Digital Payments Intelligence Platform through the Reserve Bank Innovation Hub, whose MuleHunter.AI initiative already uses AI and machine learning to identify mule accounts channelling the proceeds of fraud.The central bank has also issued a Discussion Paper on curbing digital payment frauds, particularly authorised push payment frauds; the responses are under examination. “Speed reduces the time available to detect and reverse fraud or error. Customer awareness, effective grievance redressal, transaction monitoring and appropriate authentication remain non-negotiable. And when a genuine payment is blocked, how quickly the customer regains access to her money is as much a test of the system as the block itself,” Murmu said. The measure of success for a payment system, then, is not only the number of transactions it processes each second. It is the trust embedded in each of those transactions, he added.‘Make credit better’The Deputy Governor noted that digital lending can reduce the cost of originating, assessing and servicing small loans, and partnerships can help regulated lenders reach customers previously uneconomical to serve.“But technology should widen the frontier of formal credit, not merely make existing lending faster; better data must increasingly be directed towards borrowers the formal system has never served. Credit decisions affect households for years. The objective cannot simply be to make credit faster. It must also be to make credit better,” he said.Murmu said borrowers must know who is lending to them, what the loan costs and what its terms are. Technology should widen customer choice rather than steer customers towards unsuitable products.“Partnership models are valuable, but the regulated entity remains accountable for services delivered in its name. To put it plainly: technology can distribute a service, but it cannot distribute responsibility,” he said.dsPublished on September 11, 2026
