The great banking re-composition: What will define tomorrow’s winners in 2026 and beyond

By Sajit Vijayakumar, Chief Executive Officer, Infosys Finacle

Few countries have reimagined banking as profoundly as India. India’s Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) has quietly but powerfully transformed financial access from a privilege into a reliable utility. Aadhaar gave a billion people a verifiable identity; UPI turned every smartphone into a payment terminal; Account Aggregator unlocked consent-driven data portability; e-KYC and DigiLocker collapsed onboarding friction; and OCEN opened credit rails for the smallest entrepreneurs. In FY 2024–25 alone, Aadhaar recorded over 2,707 crore authentication transactions while UPI handled 16.73 billion transactions in December 2024 amounting to ₹23.25 lakh crore,2 cementing India’s global leadership in real-time payments.

But India’s success story now poses a new strategic question: When identity, payments and data become ambient, what defines the next frontier of competitive advantage for banks?

With transaction volumes exploding, ecosystems becoming dense ...