Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani on Wednesday showcased a use case of his next innovation in public digital infrastructure, Finternet, and said it aims to go live next year.
He had introduced the concept at the Global Fintech Fest last year. Simply put, Finternet aims to build a universal platform that connects multiple financial ecosystems with each other.
“This is an idea which is going global, whether it’s in India, Singapore, New York, San Francisco, New Zealand. So, you can see the gradual expansion of what’s happening. And we think in 2026, we will be live,” he said at the Global Fintech Fest.
Shifting Assets
Nilekani noted that India’s economy is gradually shifting from traditional assets like real estate and gold toward financial assets. Yet, the country has trillions of dollars of assets that are locked in real estate and gold. The challenge, he added, is to find ways to unlock that value and make it transactable.
Tokenisation and AI
Two trends in particular, tokenisation and artificial intelligence, will enable this transformation, he said. Tokenisation allows an asset to carry all its attributes digitally. To draw a simple analogy, Nilekani said, “your 500-rupee note is a token, it carries all the attributes it needs with it.”
The idea now is to extend that concept to land, gold, and other assets, and use agentic AI to build new digital infrastructure around them. For instance, the live demo was an example of a man who owns gold but does not know how to make it into an easily transactable thing. By tokenising it through a trusted provider, the asset could become verifiable, transferable, and usable as collateral for a loan.
Finternet now has 20 ecosystem partners globally in four continents. Nilekani aims to be back at the Global Fintech Fest next year with live examples of the Finternet infrastructure in multiple sector use cases across multiple countries.