GFF 2026: Time right for trusted Agentic AI

One of the world’s largest fintech conferences, the Global Fintech Fest (GFF), commences on September 8, with a focus themed around “Agentic AI, Tokenisation and Quantum”. It will be attended by over 100,000 attendees from 70 countries.

In 2025, there was enough conversation around payment experiences, security, risk and fraud in transactions. Passkeys were starting to be adopted instead of OTPs and the regulator Reserve Bank of India (RBI) pushed for the use of biometrics.

“Now mainstream payment companies have adopted AI into their payment workflows, including banks and ecommerce firms. It has expanded into investment, shopping and travel transactions,” says Nitin Pulyani, senior vice president and head of products at Cashfree Payments, which processes $80 billion annually for over one million businesses since 2015.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will inaugurate the GFF 2026 in Mumbai and address the gathering in the evening. Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis will deliver a regulatory and economic address at the GFF, highlighting Mumbai’s transformation as a financial capital, besides scaling of infrastructure technology.

Time right for agentic AI

The rate of change and acceptance of AI has moved really fast. An August 2026 report from FICCI, Indian Banks’ Association and BCG said that agentic credit journeys can automate large parts of this process, materially reducing processing costs. “Supported by the right agentic workforce, these journeys can also become more individualized, authenticated and ensure end-to-end fulfilment.”

Earlier in the year, HDFC Bank, in its April 2026 analysts’ presentation, said it has an “independent unit in the risk team that adds a second-line safeguard. The key components include the Model Context Protocol, the Agentic Studio and Agentic Mesh.” This will enable the private sector lender to deploy AI agents to scale and place it amongst the small group of Indian and global banks with such advanced in-house capabilities.

“The time is right for agentic AI in India, but the key word is ‘trusted’ agentic AI,” Ramakrishnan Gopalan, head of products and solutions (India & South Asia) at Vida, told Fortune India.

“India, as a market, is more prepared than others. The West rode the wave of physical retail to ecommerce while India has gone from e-commerce, to m-commerce to real-time payment to instant settlement, so we are one step ahead. India is ready with a Human-in-the-loop structure.

“GFF 2026 is now trying to go beyond the use of AI; it is thinking of applicability and value that AI, cybersecurity and quantum can generate for real life. Visa, for its part, is learning the best from everywhere else. We are best placed to deal with the transition and work with everyone in the market to make sure that safety, security, trust and control goes into the whole flow,” he told Fortune India.

Sekhar Rao, CEO – India Business at Phi-Commerce, an omni-channel online payment gateway fintech, said that India has built several layers and use cases across industries, including banking and payments. “Banks have already done a fair bit of AI adoption in the back office.”

The government and regulators have encouraged innovation, but India’s ecosystem needs to build guardrails. “There is no single entity which can define these guardrails and support system.