RBI Governor asks fintechs to treat data as fiduciary responsibility, not business asset

RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra on Thursday asked the fintech ecosystem not to treat data as a business asset but as a "fiduciary responsibility" to build trust.

Addressing the Global Fintech Festival 2026 in Mumbai, Malhotra warned fintech companies about risks from opacity, bias and exclusion, concentration and herding, cybersecurity, data privacy and erosion of human judgement while adopting AI.

“Treat data as a fiduciary responsibility, not a business asset,” Malhotra said, stressing that financial and non-financial data held by fintech firms belonged to real people and should be collected for a clear purpose, used within the consent given and adequately protected.

"Where a firm treats customer data as a monetisable asset first and a responsibility second, trust erodes and once it does, it does not return easily," he said.

The governor also said fintech firms that grow large enough to potentially affect the financial system acquire responsibilities beyond their balance sheets and shareholders.

Such firms should be “not just ‘too big to fail’ but ‘too significant to be careless’”, he said, adding that operational resilience, business continuity and cybersecurity were the price of achieving scale.

Malhotra said the country’s fintech ecosystem ranked third globally by funding, having attracted $2.4 billion in 2025, and was home to 30 fintech unicorns.

However, the governor said the fintech sector still had “miles to go” and should make financial services ubiquitous, particularly for people in the informal sector, women entrepreneurs, small and marginal farmers and residents of villages and tier-3 and tier-4 towns.

“Connecting the last man standing in the queue remains the focus of today’s innovation and not merely a footnote to it,” Malhotra said.

He said traditional banking and financial service providers often struggled to economically reach such customers, while modern underwriting and credit assessment tools had made serving them commercially viable.

While the first decade of Indian fintech was largely about building for India, the next decade presented an opportunity to build for the world, he said.

Indian solutions in financial inclusion, affordable payments, digital identity, interoperable infrastructure and trusted innovation could be adapted for other emerging economies facing similar challenges, he said.

“India has the opportunity to become a trusted partner in shaping the future architecture of global finance,” Malhotra said.

The RBI governor said the central bank viewed fintech as a strategic partner in leveraging technologies such as AI, quantum technology and tokenisation to build a stable, efficient and inclusive financial system.