India’s fintech industry is undergoing a profound transformation driven by several major forces.

A new report by PwC looks at these trends, outlining structural shifts expected to shape the Indian fintech through 2030, including the advent of programmable digital infrastructure, the rise of proprietary intelligence, and the shift towards orchestration.

India’s public infrastructure is moving from static rails that move money and verify identity to programmable rails that carry conditions, purposes, and logic. This infrastructure enables payments to settle under specific terms, such as the recipient being an authorized fair-price shop, eligible commodities, or within a defined window, by enforcing conditions within the money itself instead of relying on later reconciliation.

Currently, this infrastructure includes several rails, including the retail e-rupee, a central bank digital currency (CBDC) launched in 2022, the Unified Lending Interface (ULI), a digital lending interface enabling consent-based, frictionless sharing of borrower data between financial lenders and authorized data custodians; and UPI Circle, a delegated payment feature that allows a primary bank-linked user to authorize trusted secondary users to make Unified Payment Interface (UPI) payments from their account.

These rails are now expanding. In particular, use cases tied to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI)’s programmable CBDC are growing, extending to public distribution system food subsidies in Gujarat, Puducherry, and Chandigarh during fiscal year 2026 with tokens redeemable against eligible commodities.

The central bank also developed the Unified Markets Interface for asset tokenization, and launched a pilot on tokenization of certificates of deposits last year. 0”, a pilot program testing the tokenization of corporate bonds and quicker settlement using CBDC and blockchain technology.

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