AI will play a huge role in financial inclusion, says Nandan Nilekani

Nandan Nilekani, the non-executive chairman of Infosys, emphasised the transformative role of artificial intelligence (AI) in driving financial inclusion. He highlighted how AI-powered language models can significantly expand access to financial services for billions of people.

 

“Some of the work being done by AI for Bharat at IIT Madras, including the creation of open data for Indian languages, is already being utilised by NPCI. For instance, they are enabling voice-activated commands in Hindi and English,” Nilekani explained. “If individuals in India can interact in their preferred language—whether to access information or complete tasks—it opens up financial services to a billion people.”

 

 

Nilekani was speaking at a fireside chat during Sahamati Samvaad 2024, held in Mumbai.

 

He also added that all the building blocks of digitisation in India have been created in a way that promotes financial inclusion. This began with the creation of Aadhaar, followed by its use to open bank accounts under the Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile (JAM) programme, the introduction of UPI, Aadhaar-enabled payment systems (AePS), the launch of BHIM, and the creation of the Account Aggregator (AA) system.

 

“Over the last 15 years, we have been building layers and layers. But the important principle has been population scale, small transactions, frugal engineering, and ensuring public rails with innovation led by private players,” he added.

 

These layers of financial inclusion are now leading to the adoption of the Account Aggregator system. The AA ecosystem has facilitated loan disbursements worth over Rs 88,000 crore across more than 9.5 million loans, of which around 20 per cent are unsecured business loans. The AA ecosystem has more than 8 crore users.

 

The role of AA could be significant in bringing financial accessibility to micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in the country. According to a report released at Samvaad in collaboration with McKinsey, India has around 65 million MSMEs, but the credit gap to serve this group is almost Rs 45 lakh crore.

 

With digital public infrastructure (DPI) gaining traction, companies created or businesses based on DPIs have a combined market capitalisation of $100 billion.

 

Nilekani also said the aim is to extend the DPI philosophy to 50 countries in the next five years. “At present, there are 20 countries that have implemented DPI in some form,” he added.