RBI names Unified Fintech Forum as India’s second fintech self-regulatory organisation
At Global Fintech Fest 2026, RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra announced the Unified Fintech Forum as the sector’s second SRO, calling for stronger trust, governance, cybersecurity, data stewardship and operational resilience as digital payments and lending scale.
What happened
Reserve Bank of India · RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra announced Unified Fintech Forum as the second fintech SRO, urging firms to improve trust, governance,
Key facts
- Unified Fintech Forum announced as the second SRO for the fintech sector
- 57 crore Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana accounts
- 25 crore micro-insurance policies issued
- 9 crore people covered under Atal Pension Yojana
- Around 80 crore UPI transactions
- India fintech funding of $2.4 billion last year
- 30 domestic fintech unicorns
Why this matters
Acquirers and partnership teams should prioritise fintech targets with mature risk, resilience and data-governance capabilities that can align quickly with emerging SRO-led standards.
What to watch
- Unified Fintech Forum membership criteria, codes of conduct, enforcement mechanisms and grievance-redress standards.
- RBI recognition of additional fintech SROs or directives requiring specific categories of firms to participate.
- New cybersecurity, data-localization, digital-lending, KYC or operational-resilience requirements adopted through SRO guidance.
- Merchant-service-fee changes, onboarding delays or price increases from payment aggregators and fintech infrastructure vendors.
- Funding stress, exits or M&A among smaller payment, lending and merchant-tech firms following compliance upgrades.
- Audit payment, lending, loyalty and marketplace-finance partners for SRO membership, governance maturity, cybersecurity controls and incident-response capacity.
- Budget for stricter vendor due diligence, data-sharing documentation, customer-consent flows and business-continuity testing across digital checkout and credit products.
- Favor scaled, regulated payment and lending partners that can absorb compliance costs and demonstrate transparent merchant and consumer protections.
- Review exposure to small fintech vendors supporting POS financing, BNPL, seller credit, wallets, reconciliation and fraud management; establish backup providers where concentration risk is high.