The real inclusivity gaps are created while onboarding customers across India's demographics
FinTech BizNews Service
Mumbai, July 31, 2026: August 1 is celebrated as World Fintech Day. Kedar Kulkarni, Co-founder & CEO of HyperVerge, an AI-Powered KYC-software and identity verification startup based in Bengaluru, shares his vision for the occasion:
“Every year, the story of Indian fintech gets a little harder to summarize, because the innovation is happening everywhere at once. Regulatory bodies like the RBI have consistently encouraged technology that brings people from even remote areas into the financial system, and AI is now fueling that effort at every touchpoint of the financial journey.
But AI in this context carries a responsibility the industry is still learning to hold. Most AI models were trained largely on non-Indian data, and that creates real inclusivity gaps when onboarding customers across India's demographics. What’s encouraging is that many fintechs are now building tools designed specifically to close that gap and perform consistently across race, age, and gender.
Language is another thing the sector is finally getting right. India is an amalgamation of countless languages, and a language wall at onboarding keeps people out before they ever reach a financial product. At HyperVerge, working with players across the industry gives us a unique vantage point on this, and the data is telling: close to 65 percent of video KYC users we see come from Tier 3 cities and towns, with Hindi, Telugu, Marathi, Kannada, and Tamil leading among them. Localization is doing more for inclusion than almost anything else in the stack.
Trust is the other half of the inclusion story. We’re seeing that deepfakes and identity theft have grown alongside every other advance in the sector, and real-time verification now stops most of it right at the entry point. Every fraud attempt caught keeps the system dependable for the people it was built to serve. The same modern verification is also solving older problems, like the unclaimed funds sitting in Indian banks because outdated KYC records made the right person hard to trace.
By the next World Fintech Day, I expect the sector will have carried inclusion further than any of us predict. Because at the end of the day, fintech's real product is trust, and trust compounds when everyone can walk through the door.”
