'Finternet' the future of financing systems, says Nandan Nilekani

Terming ‘Finternet’ as the future of financing systems, Nandan Nilekani, Infosys co-founder and chairman, provided a glimpse into how India’s fintech landscape would look like in the near future.

According to Nilekani, Finternet will be user-centric, unified, which means it will cover all types of assets, with a universal infrastructure.

He offered insights on the concept of tokenisation of assets in the digital world with the help of advances in cryptography.

“The Finternet is a new approach to global finance which is defined by the three ‘U’s’ – it is user centric, unified, and universal – that is keeping the user at the centre and it has to be universal, that is it has to cut through asset classes of all types. The Finternet combines the best of the regulated world with the best that tokenisation technology can offer us. It uses the basic construct of tokens and then enables universal interoperability and composability,” he said.

Nilekani was speaking at the Global Fintech Fest (GFF).

“We have seen innovation in the financial ecosystem. This is happening in India and from around the world. But we also see that financial systems are unable to handle the demand from users as they want more choice and more control,” he explained.

The main aspects of the new financial system will be to bring assets —land, property, bonds, financial investment, art, paintings — under a single infrastructure and where they get tokenised.

“It allows everybody to participate and controls all assets. We want to have something that allows everyone to participate and control all kinds of assets. User-controlled assets, user content, NFTs (non-fungible tokens), adjusted assets which are certified by somebody, registered assets like land, or regulated assets like financial products,” he explained.

Nilekani elaborated that this is not something which will happen in the distant future, but is already happening.

“This is not an architecture or a paper, it is coming together on ground. We already have several labs across the world working on Finternet. It is getting implemented as we speak around the world. This is an ambitious vision, and will be done step by step,” he added.

Nilekani, Pramod Varma, Siddharth Shetty and Agustin Carstens and the team at BIS (Bank for International Settlements) had released a white paper detailing the same in April 2024.