Treat Data As Fiduciary Responsibility RBI Gov Tells Fintechs

 Mumbai : The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor Sanjay Malhotra on Thursday urged fintechs to treat customer data as a fiduciary responsibility rather than a business asset.

Speaking at the Global Fintech Fest 2026, Malhotra said that India’s fintech ecosystem today ranks third globally by funding, having attracted $ 2. 4 billion in 2025; and is home to 30 fintech unicorns.

He listed several risks while adopting AI such as opacity, bias and exclusion, concentration and herding, cybersecurity, data privacy and security, and erosion of human judgement. He said that mitigating these risks is important for maintaining consumer trust.

“Treat data as a fiduciary responsibility, not a business asset. Every fintech in this room holds something more valuable than capital: it holds the data - financial and non-financial - of real people. This data must be treated the way a trustee treats assets held for a beneficiary: collected with clear purpose, used strictly within the consent given, and protected as though it were one’s own. ”

CS Setty, chairman of State Bank of India (SBI) said that banks could find themselves in an “AI versus AI” environment, where real-time risk assessment will require lenders to combine identity, behavioural and transactional intelligence. For financial services, he stressed, AI systems cannot operate with a 99 per cent accuracy threshold when the consequences of a mistake can involve customer funds and financial security.

He said financial AI needs to be "100 per cent accurate" because mistakes can be costly. Setty laid out three must-haves for responsible banking AI: accuracy, accountability, and fair access.

On FCNR (B) flows, Setty said that banks would take three to four months to deploy these funds and that is unlikely to trigger any abnormal lending.