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We attended the 7th edition of the Global Fintech Fest (GFF 2026), which reinforced India’s emergence as one of the world's most dynamic fintech and digital public infrastructure ecosystems. The event showcased technology-led financial systems that can operate at population scale while remaining inclusive, trusted, and resilient.

Key takeaways:

1) Paytm demonstrated its AI capabilities for enterprises as well as small businesses, through Paytm Intelligence

2) Pine Labs showcased an agentic platform for payments, alongside near-term UPI monetization and bank-acquiring launches

3) Eternal demonstrated Nugget, its voice bot, pitched for financial services

4) PhonePe announced its foray into the UAE, while Razorpay built a proprietary payments foundation model. We remain constructive on our covered companies, with reinvigorated confidence in their intent to leverage the wider, more interoperable rails of the Indian financial ecosystem alongside newer technology layers, AI, and tokenization. We retain BUY on Pine Labs and Paytm with TP of Rs190 and Rs1,700, respectively.

Paytm: Pi turns AI into a sellable product

Paytm demonstrated Paytm Intelligence (Pi) capabilities, beyond Paytm’s core payments and financial services, for banks, lenders, and insurers, as well as small merchants. On the enterprise side, Pi deploys agents across sales, service, and operations, and the tasks run multi-step with limited supervision. Underneath sits a financial-services model built over two years on Paytm's own transaction data. It assesses fraud, creditworthiness, and credibility of financial claims. For merchants, Pi generates marketing content inside the Paytm for Merchants app; a separate demo showed voice-based conversational ordering. Unlike payment device launches at GFF, the focus was entirely on AI capabilities.

Pine Labs: Betting on the agentic payment stack

Pine Labs' hero product was an agent that buys autonomously once an item’s price drops to a set level. The BigBasket demo showed it end-to-end: the agent purchased an iPhone once a price drop and preset conditions were jointly met, with no human at the transaction. Agent Toolkit, built on AgenticOrg, is that buyer-side layer, deploying rulebound agents with guardrails and auditability. Agentic Storefront is the seller-side counterpart, matching intent to live inventory and negotiating – live on L&T Finance's PlanetAI. P3P is the payment protocol underneath, letting agents initiate, authorize, and execute card and UPI payments – shown with TravelXP, Visa, Mastercard, and RuPay.

Eternal, PhonePe, and Razorpay: Adjacency plays, anchored on proprietary data

For the first time, a food delivery company turned up at a fintech fest: Eternal showcased Nugget, its enterprise voice and chat platform, already live and sold externally. The pitch was BFSI-weighted, resting on over a decade of call data spanning India's dialects. Disclosed: >2.2bn conversations handled, 85% automation coverage, and a Zomato deployment cutting support cost by over $10mn with 25% CSAT improvement. PhonePe's launch was a three-part Visa partnership. Cross Border Scan to Pay reaches over 20mn merchants across 14 Asian markets – corridors UPI has largely not opened and where interchange economics are better. Device Tap to Pay tokenizes Visa cards across 300mn Indian smartphones. Smart Accept turns merchant phones into card-acceptance devices. Razorpay launched Ray, a WhatsApp-based AI account manager for small SMEs, and showcased Vulcan, a payments foundation model trained on roughly 3trn data points across 4bn payments.

Capability is being built; monetization is not yet visible

The launch slate shows companies preparing for the next cycle while defending the current one. None of the products carried disclosed revenue, and adoption is early across all of them. AI was the predominant theme across all the sessions and launches. Convergence was striking: conversational servicing, data-to-insight, and agentic execution recurred across nearly every player, which suggests differentiation will come from proprietary data and distribution rather than the products themselves. MDR drew considerable chatter through the fest, but nothing was settled and we await clarity. We maintain BUY on Pine Labs and Paytm.

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