India's Fintechs Turn to AI for Growth Beyond Payments
India's largest fintech firms are shifting strategy. After reaching profitability, Paytm, PB Fintech, and Groww are now betting on artificial intelligence and new business lines-wealth management, stock broking, and AI-driven services-to fuel the next phase of growth.
Paytm closed fiscal 2026 with total revenue of Rs 8,437 crore, up 22% year-on-year, and posted its first full-year profit of Rs 552 crore. The company identified wealth management and stock broking as a third growth pillar alongside payments and lending.
The company spent Rs 175 crore on software, cloud, and data centre expenses in March 2026, a 21% increase from Rs 142 crore a year earlier. These investments are funding AI tools for small businesses, including fraud detection, customer onboarding, and payment trend analysis for merchants.
Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma disclosed a concrete result: conversion rates on agentic workflows improved seven to eight times compared to human workflows, which typically run at 2% to 3%. AI Agents & Automation are handling customer interactions at scale.
Broader Productivity Gains
PB Fintech reported operating revenue of Rs 7,166.4 crore in FY26, up 33% year-on-year, with net profit jumping 90% to Rs 670 crore. The company is deploying AI across customer relationships, advisory services, and data analytics-from chatbots to product recommendations.
Sarbvir Singh, group joint chief executive officer at PB Fintech, said the company prioritizes service improvement over cost cuts. "AI for us is beyond customer service. The entire company is focused on this technology and we can see productivity going up," he said during an analyst call.
PB Fintech is also using AI in underwriting and predicting high-claim probability, improving service delivery. The company is expanding into payment aggregation, stock broking, fixed income investments, and pension product distribution.
Wealth Management as the Next Bet
Groww, which has maintained strong profitability, is building a broader wealth management business targeting different customer segments. The company acquired Fisdom to establish bank-led distribution of wealth products and is launching W for HNI investors and Prime for mass-affluent customers.
Groww's operating revenue rose 19% to Rs 4,644 crore in FY26, with net profit reaching Rs 2,083 crore, up 14%. CEO Lalit Keshre said the company expects AI to reach an inflection point this year, both in improving customer experience and accelerating internal product development.
Groww warned that investments in AI and new business domains could raise the cost to serve existing customers in the coming months. The company is trading near-term margin pressure for longer-term competitive positioning.
AI for Finance is no longer a differentiator-it's becoming table stakes. These firms are moving beyond cost reduction to use AI as a tool for entering adjacent markets and improving how they operate at scale.
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