Nandan Nilekani

And at a big finance event in Mumbai last month, it was all anybody could talk about.

The RBI, the markets regulator, even Nandan Nilekani, the man behind Aadhaar, were talking about it.

But this whole plan depends on the RBI's digital version of the rupee.

And so far, very few people have actually been using it.

Today is Tuesday, the 29th of September.

[upbeat music] The Global Fintech Fest, or GFF, just concluded on the 11th of September.

Everybody from the Securities and Exchange Board of India, or SEBI, and the RBI, the Reserve Bank of India, and state governments, and the likes of Nandan Nilekani were gaga about one thing, tokenization.

At the 2025 GFF, the RBI launched the Unified Markets Interface, which is UMI, introducing the idea of tokenizing financial assets using central bank digital currency or CBDC.

So define products, educate the participants in terms of how it can be done, and smoothen out some of the challenges which can come in when they are participating.

Meanwhile, also speaking at the JFF yesterday, Infosys co-founder and chairman Nandan Nilekani, who's also the architect of Aadhaar, said India needs to build tokenization infrastructure that can operate at population scale and handle billions of transactions rather than focus merely on issuing tokens.

He said creating tokens alone would not be enough, and the ecosystem would need interoperability, liquidity, and the ability to operate at very high volumes if tokenization is to extend across different asset classes and use cases.

He did say that tokenization is already gathering momentum, pointing to the initiatives involving certificates of deposit and corporate bonds.

So I spent some time doing that.

And then that was when I, you know, interacted with Nandan Nilekani for the first time.

He used to come to DC back in those days quite often to share the stories of what had been built in India around Aadhaar, you know, in the first five, seven years of its rollout.

where, as a lot of people don't know, they were actually the fastest platform globally to reach a billion users, faster than Microsoft or Google or Amazon.