Tracking India's Fintech Ecosystem and UPI Growth
Built an independent view of India's fintech market by pulling public data, modeling UPI adoption curves, and tracking how AI is reshaping the sector.
Rishal Naik
Analyst - Risk Monitoring and Control at Futures First
From their time as
Analyst - Risk Monitoring and Control
Futures First • 2024
Overview
Outside his day-to-day work in capital markets risk, Rishal has been independently tracking India's fintech ecosystem. His starting point was the structural shift triggered by demonetization and the subsequent rise of UPI as a payments infrastructure layer.
The Story
Outside his day-to-day work in capital markets risk, Rishal has been independently tracking India's fintech ecosystem. His starting point was the structural shift triggered by demonetization and the subsequent rise of UPI as a payments infrastructure layer.
He pulled publicly available government data on digital transaction volumes and market sizing, and built his own models to project how the UPI market could grow as India's economy continues to digitize. He tracked the marketing and customer acquisition strategies of the major players, from established names to newer entrants, to understand how each was positioning for a share of the digital payments stack.
His core thesis is that the combination of a rapidly digitizing economy, a maturing UPI infrastructure, and the accelerating integration of AI into fintech products creates a structural growth opportunity for the sector.
He has also applied the same sanity-check discipline he uses in his day job to evaluate fintech valuations, cross-referencing growth claims against underlying market size, transaction volume data, and macroeconomic factors to assess whether the numbers hold up.