Weekly

Fintech Weekly Deep Dive — RBI’s First Rate Hike in Nearly Four Years: The Hidden Price of App Credit | Week of 4 October Executive Summary Of the week’s fintech stories, the Reserve Bank of India’s October 7 rate decision is the most consequential confirmed change. The Monetary Policy Committee raised the repo rate by 25 basis points, from 5.25% to 5.50%, and moved to “calibrated tightening.” It is the first increase since February 2023. The decision reverses the direction of the rate cycle and changes the funding weather for the banks and non-bank financial companies (NBFCs) that provide much of the balance sheet behind digital lending. The MPC said near-term cuts are off the table; what happens next depends on inflation and growth, not a pre-announced series of hikes.12 ...

Fintech Weekly Deep Dive — UPI’s MDR Reset: Who Pays for a ‘Free’ Rail? | Week of 27 September Executive Summary India’s planned return of a merchant discount rate (MDR) on selected Unified Payments Interface (UPI) payments is now less a debate about whether a payment network costs money than a test of who gets to set the price, who carries it, and whether the promised protections can be enforced. The framework, announced on 15 September and due to take effect on 15 October, leaves person-to-person transfers free and places a 0.4% MDR on specified person-to-merchant transactions above ₹2,000. Payments of ₹75,000 or more have a ₹300 cap; qualifying small merchants remain exempt. The Finance Ministry says about 96% of merchant transactions will be unaffected.12 ...

Fintech Weekly Deep Dive — Free to Fee: The UPI MDR Notification | Week of September 14–20, 2026 Executive Summary Three weeks ago, this column argued that UPI’s second decade would be defined by three questions — who pays, who controls, and who sees — and that the legislative groundwork for ending free merchant payments had already been laid in Parliament. This week the answer arrived. On September 14, the Finance Ministry announced a revised merchant-payment framework, and on September 15 the UPI Steering Committee and NPCI detailed it: a Merchant Discount Rate (MDR) of 0.4% (40 basis points) applies to person-to-merchant (P2M) UPI transactions above ₹2,000 from October 15, 2026, capped at ₹300 per transaction for payments of ₹75,000 and above. India’s ten-year experiment with zero-MDR UPI formally ends in under a month. ...

Fintech Weekly Deep Dive — NPCI’s Unified Agent Protocol: When AI Agents Hold the UPI Purse Strings | Week of Aug 30–Sep 5, 2026 Executive Summary This was the week India confirmed it is about to let artificial intelligence spend the nation’s money. On September 1, Reuters reported — from three sources familiar with the matter — that NPCI has prepared a framework allowing AI agents to make small UPI payments without the user approving each transaction, potentially making UPI the world’s largest payments network with agentic capability. Within a day, Inc42 put a name on it: the Unified Agent Protocol (UAP), expected to be unveiled at the Global Fintech Fest in Mumbai this coming week, September 8–11. If that happens, India will become the first country to operate agentic payments on national, population-scale public infrastructure — on a network that in August processed a record 24.51 billion transactions worth ₹29.82 lakh crore, clearing over 9,000 payments every second. ...

Fintech Weekly Deep Dive — UPI’s Second Decade: The Free Ride Ends | Week of August 24–30, 2026 Executive Summary UPI turned ten on August 25. The numbers are deservedly celebrated — 24,162 crore annual transactions, ₹314 lakh crore in value, 49% of all real-time payments globally, 741 banks live, 11 countries connected. But this week’s coverage of the anniversary coincided with three developments that, taken together, reveal the platform’s most consequential inflection point since demonetisation drove its initial adoption. ...

Fintech Weekly Deep Dive — UPI’s Free Ride Ends | Week of August 17–23, 2026 Executive Summary India is about to end the most ambitious free-payment experiment in financial history. On August 10, Parliament passed the Taxation and Other Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2026, amending Section 10A of the Payment and Settlement Systems Act, 2007. The amendment removes the statutory bar on charging fees for digital payments and empowers the UPI Steering Committee to implement a targeted Merchant Discount Rate (MDR) framework. ...

Fintech Weekly Deep Dive — Bank of America’s $1.9 Billion Jio Credit Bet | Week of August 10–16, 2026 Executive Summary On August 12, 2026, Bank of America and Jio Financial Services announced the largest foreign investment in an Indian non-bank lender in recent memory: up to ₹18,268 crore ($1.9 billion) for a 49.9% stake in Jio Credit Limited, the digital lending subsidiary of Mukesh Ambani’s financial services arm. The deal values the two-year-old NBFC at approximately $3.8 billion — 2.5 times its net worth — and signals a structural shift in how Wall Street approaches India’s credit markets. ...

Fintech Weekly Deep Dive — The End of Free UPI | Week of August 3–9, 2026 Executive Summary On August 6, 2026, the Lok Sabha passed the Taxation and Other Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2026, which amends Section 10A of the Payment and Settlement Systems Act, 2007 — the legal provision that has mandated zero Merchant Discount Rate (MDR) on UPI and RuPay debit card transactions since January 2020. The Bill does not impose fees immediately. Instead, it replaces the blanket prohibition with a framework that allows the Central Government to notify, by executive order alone, which electronic payment modes remain exempt from MDR charges. ...

Fintech Weekly Deep Dive — India’s $41 Billion Forex Firewall | Week of July 27 – August 2, 2026 Executive Summary In eight weeks, the Reserve Bank of India has pulled off what may be the fastest capital mobilisation in Indian central banking history. The concessional forex swap facility announced on June 5, 2026 has attracted $40.82 billion in foreign currency inflows by July 31 — surpassing the entire $26 billion raised under the iconic 2013 FCNR(B) swap window, and doing it in roughly half the time. ...

Fintech Weekly Deep Dive — UPI’s Free Lunch Era Nears Its End | Week of July 20–26, 2026 Executive Summary India’s government is actively considering reintroducing a Merchant Discount Rate (MDR) on UPI transactions for large merchants — the most consequential policy shift in digital payments since zero-MDR was mandated in January 2020. Under the proposal reported by the Economic Times on July 16, merchants with annual turnover of ₹1–1.5 crore would pay 5–7 basis points on UPI transactions exceeding ₹2,000. Person-to-person transfers and payments to small merchants would remain untouched. ...