Take leadership of tokenization while the rails are still being laid

India has one DPI stack, three regulators and 18 months to achieve this—or cede a big opportunity

- SHASHANK PAHADE

Singapore has run more than 15 tokenization pilots. Hong Kong has wired its central bank into a tokenization sandbox with four major lenders. New York’s BlackRock has parked over $600 million in a single tokenized Treasury fund. And India?

Three regulators—the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) and the GIFT City-based International Financial Services Centres Authority (IFSCA)—are each working on a piece of the same architecture on three different clocks. The window to align them is about 18 months.

Fintech is evolving fast. The next layer of finance—tokenized money-market funds, government bonds, real-estate slices and carbon credits—is emerging from regulatory sandboxes globally, from Singapore to London. India could lead this race: UPI is the world’s largest real-time payments network; Aadhaar and DigiLocker form the world’s most populous digital-identity layer; and a digital rupee is live in pilot. What India lacks is regulator coordination to govern tokens.