When fintech becomes infrastructure: A deep dive with PhonePe’s Rahul Chari on AI, trust, and the next phase of India’s digital economy
India’s fintech story is usually told through scale. Billions of UPI transactions. Millions of merchants. QR codes are now so deeply woven into everyday commerce that even the country’s smallest roadside stalls have become endpoints in a real-time financial network.
But scale alone does not explain what is really happening. Somewhere during the last decade, digital payments in India stopped being a consumer convenience and started becoming infrastructure. Quietly, almost invisibly, fintech platforms moved from the edge of economic life to its centre. And with that transition comes a far more consequential question: What happens when private technology platforms begin functioning like public utilities?
That question hangs subtly underneath every conversation with Rahul Chari, co-founder and CTO of PhonePe. Chari did not speak about fintech with the triumphalism common in the startup ecosystem. There is little rhetoric about disruption or growth-at-all-costs. Instead, he speaks like someone acutely aware that India’s...
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