India’s Fintech Future in the Age of Invisible Finance
Rohith Reji is the cofounder and CEO of Indian fintech Neokred Technologies, a banking-as-a-service (BaaS) platform. Neokred's main products include ProfileX, an identity verification and risk assessment system, and CollectBot, a payments tool for companies.
The Indian fintech landscape is entering a phase of measured growth and structural maturity, where sustainability, resilience, and innovation are taking precedence over rapid expansion. In an exclusive interview with CEO Insights, Rohith Reji, CEO, Neokred , shares his perspective on the evolving dynamics of the sector. He also reflects on leadership philosophies and provides practical advice for emerging fintech founders navigating this transformative phase.
The fintech sector saw a modest two percent YoY growth in funding in 2025. What does this signal about investor sentiment today?
Framing it as “only 2percent” misses what is actually a significant structural shift in how capital views the industry. The growth witnessed in 2025 isn’t a slowdown but maturation. And this maturation is far more valuable than a regular sugar rush. It signals that capital has moved from being speculative to being purposeful. The era of funding a deck and a dream is behind us.
Investors today are rewarding what I’d like to call “resilient scale”. These are businesses that can grow without hemorrhaging cash, that have real unit economics and that are building something the digital economy actually needs. The metric that excites a serious investor in 2026 is not GMV or downloaded numbers. It is net revenue retention how defensible the infrastructure stack really is.
For the fintech ecosystem, this recalibration is genuinely healthy. It filters out the noise, ensures companies receiving capital are the ones laying the actual plumbing of our digital economy: the pipes, the rails, the connective tissue that makes financial services work for a billion-plus people. That kind of building deserves patient, purposeful capital. And increasingly, that is exactly what it is getting.
With shrinking margins in a zero-MDR environment, what are the biggest challenges fintechs face in sustaining profitability?
Zero-MDR was the fintech industry’s great forcing function. It compelled every player in the payments space to confront an uncomfortable truth. If your business model sits on transaction fees, you don’t have a business, you have a utility with a margin problem.
What zero-MDR really did was force fintech to stop being “payment processors” and start becoming value-engineers. The biggest challenge or rather the most exciting opportunity lies in transitioning toward a Fintech-as-a-Service model, where profitability doesn’t live in the transaction itself but in the intelligence and services layered on top of it.
The value-added layer is where the real business is being built like credit underwriting-as-a-service, embedded insurance at the point of need, and sophisticated treasury and liquidity tools for businesses that have never had access to them before. This is the new core. The mental model I keep coming back to is this: treat payments as the handshake, and infrastructure as the value. The handshake opens the door. What you do once you’re inside the room, the trust you build, the services you offer, and the intelligence you deliver, that is where durable profitability lives. The fintechs that understand this transition are the ones writing their next chapter. The ones still mourning MDR are already falling behind.
With UPI handling billions of transactions, how can fintechs ensure reliability at scale?
When you operate at the scale UPI now operates at, reliability stops being a technical KPI and becomes a social contract. Every failed transaction is a broken promise to a user who may be paying rent, settling a medical bill, or transferring money to a family member in another city.
Ensuring reliability at this scale requires a fundamental architectural shift from monolithic systems to modular infrastructure. By decoupling the application layer from the core payment rails, you gain the ability to upgrade, stress-test, and recover individual components without cascading failures across the entire system. Resilience has to be designed in, not patched in after the fact.
Equally critical is the adoption of AI-driven transaction routing. Intelligent systems that can read network health in real time, anticipate congestion, and dynamically reroute transactions are the baseline expectation for any serious infrastructure player. The goal is a baseline 99.9percent success rate.
Ultimately, in a digital-first India where hundreds of millions of people have placed their financial lives on these rails, reliability is the foundation upon which consumer trust is built. You cannot have financial inclusion without financial reliability. The two are inseparable.
How can startups strike the right balance between growth, innovation, and sustainability?
I often return to what I think of as the Michelangelo effect when I consider this question. Michelangelo famously said that the sculpture already exists within the marble; the artist’s job is simply to chip away everything that isn’t the sculpture. For startups, the discipline required is exactly that: chipping away the non-essential stone to reveal the masterpiece within.
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In practical terms, that means ruthlessly interrogating your customer acquisition costs and asking whether every feature you’re building actually earns its place. The disease that kills most startups is excess. Too many features chasing too many use cases, and none of them done exceptionally well is a recipe for disaster.
The balance I advocate for is this simple. Let innovation be in service of efficiency, not novelty. Before shipping anything, ask two questions. Does this improve unit economics? Does this meaningfully improve user experience? If the honest answer to both is no, it’s an excess stone. So chip it away.
Growth built on this kind of disciplined clarity is the only growth worth having. It compounds and survives downturns. It attracts the right capital and the right talent. Sustainability isn’t the enemy of ambition but the foundation that makes ambition achievable at scale.
What trends will define the next phase of fintech evolution in India?
If I had to name this moment in India’s fintech story, I would call it the age of Invisible Finance. We are moving, rapidly and irreversibly, toward a world where financial services are experiences seamlessly woven into the non-financial journeys people are already on. Embedded finance, in other words, is about to go from a buzzword to the default architecture of how services are delivered.
Within that larger arc, two developments stand out as genuinely transformational. The first is credit on UPI. I believe this will be the single biggest financial inclusion driver India has ever seen.
By riding rails that already reach hundreds of millions of users and are deeply trusted, credit on UPI has the potential to bring formal lending to populations that have been structurally excluded from it. The distribution problem, which was historically the hardest problem in financial inclusion, is essentially already solved.
The second is cash-flow based lending finally displacing collateral-heavy credit models. This is the breakthrough that unlocks growth for millions of MSMEs across the country. A small manufacturer in Coimbatore or a trader in Nagpur shouldn’t need to pledge property to access working capital. Their transaction history, their invoicing cadence, their cash flow, that’s their credit story. The infrastructure to read that story accurately is maturing rapidly, and when it reaches critical mass, the impact on the small business economy will be profound.
Tell us about your leadership approach. What are the guidelines or methodologies you follow as a leader?
My leadership methodology at its core is built on two pillars: Equilibrium and Empowerment.
Equilibrium, for me, is an active discipline. In a sector as dynamic and regulation-intensive as fintech, the temptation is always to lurch toward speed at the expense of governance, or toward caution at the expense of momentum. The leader’s job is to hold the tension between those forces and make that tension productive. Balancing high-speed innovation with regulatory rigour is a competitive advantage. The best companies in this space have learned to move fast and move right simultaneously.
Empowerment is the other side of the coin. I don’t believe in micro-management, and I never have. My role is to provide my team with the right marble and the right tools and then to step back and let them carve their own path. Extraordinary people do their best work when they have genuine ownership over outcomes, not just tasks. When they feel trusted enough to take risks, to make calls, to fail fast and to learn faster.
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At Neokred, this philosophy is baked into how we build. We are in the business of creating infrastructure that lets others succeed whether that’s our clients, our partners, or our own people. The highest expression of leadership, in my view, is building systems and cultures that are greater than any single person’s contribution, including the leader’s.
What advice would you give to early-stage fintech founders navigating this shift?
The single most important mindset shift I would urge early-stage founders to make is this: stop building bonfires and start building engines. A bonfire is spectacular, it attracts attention, generates heat, burns brightly and then burns out. An engine is quieter, but it compounds. It keeps running, and powers things long after the initial spark.
Beyond that, three principles stand out as non-negotiable for this moment.
First is to solve for Bharat. The next wave of meaningful growth in Indian fintech will have 500 million users. These users have different friction points, different trust architecture and different relationships with money and technology. Founders who go deep into understanding and solving those friction points rather than building incrementally better solutions for already-served segments are the ones who will define the next decade.
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Second is to choose collaboration over competition. The fintech ecosystem in India is vast and, in many ways, still being assembled. The most sophisticated founders I have met understand that the opportunity lies in plugging into existing infrastructure rather than rebuilding everything from first principles. Find the rails that already exist, find the partners who have already solved the problems adjacent to yours and collaborate ferociously.
Third is to be compliant by design. I cannot stress this enough. In 2026, founders who treat regulation as an afterthought are making a strategic error that will cost them dearly. Regulation, approached thoughtfully, is the most durable competitive moat. Building compliance into the DNA of your product from day one signals trust to your customers, your investors, and your institutional partners. In a world where trust is the scarcest resource, that signal is worth more than almost anything else you can build.