Adoption of artificial intelligence across India’s financial services industry is expected to rise from 26% to 65% within 12 months, according to a new report from KPMG in India and Mastercard. The country’s fintech ecosystem now counts more than 17,700 companies.
The figures come from ‘Intelligent, sovereign and scalable: Architecting the future-ready financial operating system’, which KPMG in India and Mastercard presented at Global Fintech Fest 2026. The report looks at how AI, digital public infrastructure, data-sharing frameworks, tokenisation and sovereign technology capabilities are changing the way financial institutions operate – and what that means for India in particular.
The adoption forecast is its central claim. A jump from roughly a quarter of firms to two thirds in a single year would mark the point at which the industry stops running AI as a series of pilots and starts deploying it at scale. The report describes that as a move away from standalone technology deployments towards integrated architectures that connect decision-making, execution and governance across the value chain.
“The future of financial services will be defined by the convergence of AI, trusted data sharing and real time digital infrastructure,” said Akhilesh Tuteja, Partner and Head, Clients and Markets at KPMG in India. “India starts from a position of strength, having built some of the world’s successful digital public platforms at scale.”
Built on public infrastructure
That starting position is the report’s explanation for why India can move faster than other markets. Over the past decade the country has built interoperable digital public infrastructure at population scale: Aadhaar for identity, UPI for real-time payments, DigiLocker and ONDC, and the Account Aggregator framework for consent-based data sharing between financial institutions.
The Account Aggregator numbers show how far that layer has come. Approximately 2.9 billion financial accounts are now enabled to share data through the framework, supported by more than 538 million fulfilled consents as of July 2026. The report presents that consent-based data flow as the raw material for faster, more data-driven services – and the reason AI adoption can scale in India at a pace other markets would struggle to match.
Tokenisation is the second catalyst the report singles out. With the global digital assets market expected to generate around $101 billion in revenue by 2026, the conversion of financial assets into digitally tradable instruments is gaining ground as a way to improve liquidity and market access. Further out, institutions are preparing for quantum-era cryptographic risks across payments and digital identity, while regulatory intelligence – AI-driven monitoring and automated reporting – is being built into day-to-day operations.
“India has already demonstrated the transformative power of digital public infrastructure at scale,” said Hemant Jhajhria, Head of Consulting at KPMG in India. “The next frontier lies in combining AI, trusted data-sharing frameworks, programmable finance and sovereign technology capabilities to create a financial operating system that is intelligent, resilient and future-ready.”
Trust as the design constraint
The word ‘sovereign’ in the title carries the next phase. As attention shifts to sovereign AI, governance frameworks and resilient infrastructure, the report positions India to build a financial ecosystem that balances innovation with strategic self-reliance, rather than one that depends on technology foundations it does not control.
It also puts a brake on the adoption story. Scaling AI only counts as a success, the authors argue, if what gets scaled can be trusted, withstands shocks and pays for itself.
“The true test of innovation is not whether it can be launched, but whether it can be trusted, scaled and sustained,” said Kunal Pande, Partner and Leader – Cyber, Risk and Compliance at KPMG in India. “As financial services become more intelligent and interconnected, trust, risk, resilience and sustainable unit economics must form part of the design blueprint.”
Institutions that pair technological ambition with strong governance, cyber resilience and commercial viability will be better placed to scale responsibly, Pande added. If India gets that balance right, the report concludes, it has the opportunity to shape a model for the future of finance that is relevant well beyond its own borders.