RBI pushes fintech to cross-border, says will provide infra

Mumbai:Reserve Bank of India Deputy Governor T Rabi Sankar said that FinTech self-regulatory organizations should work to remove inefficiencies in the system, particularly in cross-border payments, and bring about the same efficiencies as domestic payments.

Charting the roadmap for the SROs, the first of which was registered yesterday, Sankar said that SROs should prepare the sector to demonstrate the same level of responsibility as traditional banks and finance companies as the sector matures. The SROs have also been asked to ensure fair pricing and check the practice of `dark patterns’ – deceptive tactics in software to manipulate users into making unintended decisions.

Speaking at the Global Fintech Fest in Mumbai, Sankar said that the ‘India model of digitization’ was to create digital public infrastructure in the public sector and allow for innovation and product creation in the private sector to make it widely available.

Speaking at the same event, P Vasudevan, executive director of RBI, said that the UPI was being internationalized so that the same app could be used in different countries. “We are trying to make our SFMS (structured financial messaging system) global. “The volume that SWIFT processes for cross-border transactions is much lower than that of SFMS. We are also considering making our INFINET (Indian Financial Network) available for others,” said Vasudevan.

“So it will ultimately be a technology stack that we are trying to offer. We will be very happy to ring-fence ourselves from whatever happens elsewhere, when we have this technology available,” said Vasudevan. He added that the intention was to hold the GFF in other countries in future.

Earlier speaking at GFF, Ajay Kumar Choudhary, chairman of the National Payments Corporation of India, said that one of the biggest risks for the system was financial crime and fraud, with over $3 trillion in illicit funds flowing through the financial system in 2023. He said that the Corporation had developed real-time fraud risk management solution and a pilot project that helps identify mule accounts and banks are being informed about them as soon as they are identified.

“In India, the situation is equally alarming, with cybercrimes amounting to over ₹1,007 crore in the last four months of 2024. The increasing sophistication of frauds, often leveraging AI and crypto, poses a significant challenge. Criminals have adapted quickly to new defences, utilizing technologies like deep fake fraud and human-operated ransomware attacks to perpetrate complex scams at minimal cost,” said Choudhary.


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