RBI deputy governor calls for stronger human accountability in automated finance
RBI deputy governor Shirish Chandra Murmu urged lenders and fintechs to strengthen accountability as automation expands, flagging digital-lending transparency, UPI resilience, fraud prevention and customer protection.
What happened
Reserve Bank of India · RBI deputy governor Shirish Chandra Murmu urged stronger lender and fintech accountability as finance automates, highlighting
Key facts
- 2025
Why this matters
Acquirers should prioritize targets with mature governance, explainable automation and proven fraud and customer-protection capabilities, while discounting assets with regulatory-control gaps.
What to watch
- RBI circulars or speeches specifying board accountability, responsible-AI, algorithmic audit or operational-resilience expectations.
- Supervisory actions, penalties or restrictions involving digital lenders, payment aggregators, UPI participants or outsourced technology providers.
- NPCI changes to uptime, transaction-failure, fraud-monitoring, dispute-resolution or participant-certification requirements.
- An increase in UPI outages, failed-transaction complaints, mule-account enforcement actions or reported digital-payment fraud.
- New requirements for lending explainability, human review of adverse decisions, borrower disclosures or regulated-entity accountability for lending service providers.
- Map accountable executives and board committees for automated credit decisions, payment operations, fraud losses and customer remediation.
- Strengthen vendor and model inventories, including decision logs, override records, data lineage, model-change approvals and third-party service-level obligations.
- Stress-test UPI and lending workflows for outages, transaction reversals, fraud surges, complaint backlogs and manual-fallback capacity.
- Review digital-lending disclosures, consent flows, pricing explanations, collection practices and grievance-resolution timelines for customer-harm exposure.
- Prioritise fraud-loss analytics and rapid reimbursement/escalation playbooks, especially where automation may delay human intervention.