Fintech Brief — August 29, 2026 Allahabad HC Issues Notice to RBI, NPCI on Plea for UPI “Accept/Decline” Option The Allahabad High Court’s Lucknow Bench has issued notice to the RBI, NPCI, and the Union Ministry of Finance over a PIL seeking a mandatory “Accept/Decline” mechanism for incoming electronic payments. A Division Bench of Justice Rajan Roy and Justice Manjive Shukla heard the petition filed by advocate Anupriya Agarwal on August 24. 1 ...
Fintech Brief — August 28, 2026 RBI Eases Dollar Deposit Swap Rules Ahead of August 31 Deadline The Reserve Bank of India has given banks greater flexibility in swapping overseas dollar deposits, just days before the August 31 deadline for its special FCNR(B) deposit scheme. The move addresses a practical problem: a surge in dollar inflows under the scheme was leaving banks with excess dollar balances they had to roll over in the overnight swap market until their designated swap day with the RBI. ...
Fintech Brief — August 27, 2026 SEBI Bans JPMorgan Unit from Equity Markets Over Closing Auction Manipulation SEBI has barred JPMorgan-owned Copthall Mauritius Investment and Mumbai broker Mansi Share and Stock Broking from India’s securities market for allegedly manipulating prices on the newly launched Closing Auction Session (CAS). The alleged violation occurred on August 13 — just six days before SEBI issued its order, a turnaround speed that would have been unthinkable from the regulator historically. For context, the Jane Street ban took over 17 months. ...
Fintech Brief — August 26, 2026 UPI Completes a Decade: 13,000x Volume Growth in 10 Years The Unified Payments Interface turned ten on August 25. Launched in 2016 with just 21 banks, UPI now connects 741 banks and processes an average of 66 crore transactions daily. Annual volume surged from 1.78 crore in FY 2016-17 to over 24,162 crore in FY 2025-26 — a roughly 13,000-fold increase. Transaction value climbed from ₹0.07 lakh crore to approximately ₹314 lakh crore in the same period. UPI now accounts for 84% of India’s retail payment transactions by volume and 58% by value. PM Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah both marked the occasion, with the Finance Ministry releasing a 10-year digital payments report through NPCI. ...
Fintech Brief — August 25, 2026 UPI Completes a Decade: From 1.78 Crore to 24,162 Crore Annual Transactions The Unified Payments Interface, launched by NPCI on August 25, 2016, turns ten today — and the numbers are staggering. Annual transaction volume surged nearly 13,000-fold, from 1.78 crore in FY 2016-17 to 24,162 crore in FY 2025-26. Transaction value hit ₹314 lakh crore in the same period, while monthly volumes touched a record 2,366 crore in July 2026. ...
Fintech Brief — August 24, 2026 Razorpay Launches Vulcan — India’s First AI Foundation Model for Payments Razorpay has launched Vulcan, a transformer-based AI foundation model built specifically for payments processing — not an LLM, but a purpose-built architecture that treats each payment as an unordered set of fields, tokenising even missing values. Trained on roughly 3 trillion data points from 4 billion transactions and weighing about 3,000 signals per transaction, Vulcan collapses routing, fraud detection, risk scoring and checkout personalisation into a single model. Built with NVIDIA and AWS, the model is already in beta across 51,000 businesses. Early results: 8–10% better payment success rates, 8x more international card fraud blocked, and 5x more fraudulent transactions caught without additional false-positive alerts. The approach diverges from Nubank’s nuFormer and Revolut’s PRAGMA — both sequence models optimised for card-heavy markets — because India’s payment landscape (UPI, cards, netbanking, COD) needs a set-based approach rather than sequential ordering. Telangana Today ...
Fintech Brief — August 23, 2026 RBI’s Forex Swap Facility Crosses $72.85 Billion — FCNR(B) Window Closing August 31 The Reserve Bank of India’s special USD-INR forex swap facility has attracted $72.85 billion in total inflows as of August 21, with FCNR(B) deposits alone accounting for $65.40 billion — nearly 90% of the total. The Hindu Overseas Foreign Currency Borrowings contributed $4.86 billion and External Commercial Borrowings $2.59 billion. The scale has already surpassed the RBI’s 2013 FCNR(B) swap window. Given the “encouraging response,” the RBI has brought forward the FCNR(B) deposit mobilisation deadline to August 31, 2026 (swaps can still be availed until September 11). The ECB/OFCB window remains open until December 31. ...
Fintech Brief — August 22, 2026 UPI MDR on Transactions Above ₹2,000 Could Begin Within Two Weeks The government is preparing to issue a gazette notification through the Department of Financial Services that will set the stage for a Merchant Discount Rate on UPI transactions above ₹2,000, with implementation potentially beginning within a fortnight. 1 Following the notification, an NPCI-led Services Steering Committee will determine the framework, scope, and rate structure for the levy. Consumers are expected to remain exempt — the charge will fall on merchants. A 2017 RBI rule that prohibits merchants from passing debit card MDR onto customers could serve as a template for consumer protection under the UPI MDR regime as well. 2 ...
Fintech Brief — August 21, 2026 UPI Transaction Fees Expected Within Two Weeks The government is preparing to announce a 0.3% Merchant Discount Rate (MDR) on UPI transactions of ₹2,000 and above, with an official notification expected within two weeks. The move follows the passage of legislation earlier this month that laid the legal groundwork for ending India’s zero-MDR regime for merchant payments — while keeping peer-to-peer transactions free. Industry experts have pushed back, arguing that zero MDR for small merchants and low-value payments must be retained to protect UPI’s financial inclusion gains. UPI processed a record 23.66 billion transactions worth ₹29.88 lakh crore in July 2026, according to NPCI data, making it the backbone of India’s digital payments ecosystem. The challenge now: designing a tiered MDR structure that recovers infrastructure costs without pricing small merchants out of digital payments. ...
Fintech Brief — August 20, 2026 RBI Deputy Governor Lays Out Five Tests for Responsible AI in Banking RBI Deputy Governor Shirish Chandra Murmu delivered a keynote on August 19 — “A Vision for Responsible AI, Resilient Banking” — laying out five supervisory expectations for banks deploying AI: Include, Adapt, Understand, Safeguard, Explain. The core message: a machine may reach a decision, but a person must own it. Banks remain accountable even when models come from fintech partners or third-party vendors. Customers must be told when an automated system made a decision, given an understandable explanation, and have access to a human reviewer with authority to reverse it. ...