Region Focus | India & South Asia
India's National Payments Corporation (NPCI) is building a Unified Agent Protocol that would let AI agents make payments on a user's behalf over UPI, possibly unveiled at the Global Fintech Fest in Mumbai (Sept 8-11); Bengaluru startup Gnani AI used the same event to announce its sovereign AI stack, Gnani Artha, expanding into banking, insurance, and financial services (BFSI); around the same time, Visa, Mastercard, and Ant International announced a cross-network AI agent identity framework called KYA — signaling that 'who gets to verify an AI agent's identity' is becoming a new battleground in global payments.