India, Sept. 9 -- Over the last few years, Indian fintechs have been fighting to retain margin in an increasingly commoditised payments business, where UPI's near-zero-cost model has forced most players to look elsewhere beyond transaction fees for their next leg of growth. That search has increasingly led them to enterprise software and AI, where financial institutions - banks, NBFCs, insurers - are willing to pay for automation that reduces costs and speeds up fraud detection, underwriting and customer services. Global technology majors and cloud providers have been circling this opportunity as well.

Which means the fintechs best placed to compete are ones sitting on proprietary transaction and behavioural data that generic AI vendors...