If the last decade of Indian fintech belonged to payments, the next one could well belong to wealth. UPI made moving money instant and free. Digital lending turned access to credit into an afternoon on a phone. These solved the hardest, least glamorous work of inclusion. But the frontier has now shifted to the harder question that sits just after money lands in an account: what do you do with it? For most Indians, that question is still unanswered.
Why the demand for wealth is exploding now
Four forces are compounding at once, and together they turn wealth planning from a choice into a compulsion for the Indian middle class.
We are living longer, so savings must last decades more than our parents’ did. There is no government pension at the end of it. This is the first generation deciding that it won't depend on its children. And incomes are rising fast, leaving more people with surplus but no framework for it.
The result is a generation earning well and saving diligently, yet unsure if they are on the right track. Mutual fund Assets Under Management crossed Rs 87 lakh crore in August 2026. Tens of millions now invest with the discipline of a rent payment, but investing regularly and having a plan are not the same thing.
The structural gap
The uncomfortable truth is who Indians actually turn to for advice. Most of it comes from pseudo-advisors, mutual fund distributors and bank relationship managers whose income depends on the products they sell. However well-meaning, the incentive is structurally conflicted: they earn when you buy, not when you do well. And when people don't turn to them, they lean on family, friends or a WhatsApp group.
The genuinely fiduciary side, SEBI-registered advisers paid by the client and not the product, numbers only around 900 for the entire country, and most serve the HNI and UHNI segment where the economics work. A few newer players do good work, but only within a single asset class.
So, the salaried professional in the middle is left choosing between advice that's conflicted and advice that's out of reach and unaffordable. That gap, not access to investing, is the real unsolved problem of this decade.
Why it's finally possible now
What has changed is that three tailwinds have arrived together, and for the first time they make conflict-free advice both scalable and affordable for a 30-million-strong retail audience, not just the wealthy.
The RBI's Account Aggregator infrastructure can pull a person's full financial picture, bank balances, stocks, mutual funds, NPS and more, in minutes, with their consent.
On top of that, AI can read those cash flows, model goals against risk and inflation, flag what is leaking or off-track, and turn a once-a-year conversation into continuous, personal guidance, the kind of attention that once required a dedicated wealth manager. Crucially, it collapses the cost of that guidance, making it affordable for millions rather than a privilege of the few.
And the regulator itself is pushing in this direction. SEBI is working hard to ease RIA norms, because it sees what developed economies already have: a large middle class that needs access to fiduciary advice, not just products.
The open question, and the one new-age companies are all trying to answer, is how much of this should be pure AI versus AI with a human alongside. Will people be comfortable letting an algorithm suggest changes to their money, or will trust still need a human in the room? That answer has not been settled yet, and whoever gets it right will shape the category.
The way forward
Wealth is a slower, harder kind of trust to earn than payments. The outcome, a family that reaches its goals, only shows up years later. So the real question for a new-age player is this: can it compound trust along the way, through every workflow, every market dip, every review and nudge, so that it earns the right to be there when the outcome finally arrives?
That is the work of this decade. Not moving money faster, but becoming the advice Indians actually trust with what to do with their money — advice that's finally on their side.
(Rohit Tuteja is the co-founder and CEO of finny.club, a SEBI-registered fee-only investment adviser)
