FM Nirmala Sitharaman pushes unified KYC framework, asks Sebi to lead

Mumbai: Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Saturday called for a unified know-your-customer (KYC) system across the financial sector to eliminate repeated verification for users, and urged the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) to lead the effort.

"It is a shared responsibility of all stakeholders to ensure that no citizen has to repeat the same verification journey across multiple financial products and platforms," Sitaraman said at an event to mark the markets regulator's 38th Foundation Day here.

"We need a seamless, secure and portable KYC experience across the financial sector," she said.


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The current fragmented KYC framework imposes unnecessary friction on users, the minister said, stressing the need for urgent reform through digitisation and common standards across regulators.

Sebi is well-placed to drive convergence given its scale and digital infrastructure, she said.

Sitharaman urged the market regulator to shift from reactive oversight to anticipatory regulation. "The lesson from history is not that regulation should become more restrictive, but that it must become more sophisticated and anticipatory rather than reactive," she said.

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The FM also urged Sebi to focus on emerging risks such as artificial intelligence-led market abuse, cybersecurity threats and cross-border fraud.

"It is the mark of a mature regulatory system that it learns from past episodes without being paralysed by them," she said. "The measure of institutional quality is not the absence of such episodes, but the speed and rigour of the corrective response and the structural improvements that follow."

Raising concerns over cybersecurity, Sitharaman warned that a major cyberattack on financial infrastructure could have systemic consequences.

"A single successful cyberattack on a major exchange, depository, clearing corporation or large intermediary could disrupt markets at a national scale, erase wealth, and shake public confidence," she said. "The tools of attack are evolving at high speed, and the tools of defence must evolve even faster."

While acknowledging Sebi's progress in cybersecurity frameworks and use of AI-driven surveillance, Sitharaman called for continued investments in defence capabilities and public awareness campaigns against digital fraud.