FM Sitharaman lauds fintechs for boosting digital infrastructure, empowering small businesses and welfare delivery

Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Tuesday acknowledged India’s fintech firms’ contribution to expanding the country's digital public infrastructure (DPI) and in enabling seamless, secure and inclusive financial services for merchants and micro and small medium enterprises.

Sitharaman was visiting Pine Labs, a digital fintech company, in Noida, and witnessed demonstrations on innovative Fintech solutions being developed around prepaid instruments, the Account Aggregator (AA) framework, and digital services used in the Public Distribution System (PDS) and other government schemes & services.

During her visit she also interacted with individuals who greatly benefitted from India’s growing fintech ecosystem and robust digital public infrastructure (DPI).


The finance minister in the past has also hailed DPI while noting that direct benefit transfer systems have aided about 650 million people who received $322 billion directly into their accounts, leading to overall savings of more than $27 billion just across key central government services and schemes.

“Leveraging the potential of identity and payments through DPI alone, India’s record opening of 462.5 million low-cost bank accounts with 56% of account holders being women. This has enabled us to transform the govt service delivery by building the world’s largest direct benefit transfer systems,” she had earlier said in a speech.