RBI deputy governor Murmu calls for stronger human accountability as finance automates
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) believes that as finance becomes more automated, human accountability must become stronger, not weaker, deputy governor Shirish Chandra Murmu said on Friday.
Murmu said the answer cannot be that the algorithm is accountable. Responsibility rests with the regulated institution, as well as its board and senior management, who must understand the models they deploy, their limitations and the consequences of their use.
Digital lending can reduce the cost of originating, assessing and servicing small loans, while partnerships can help regulated lenders reach customers previously uneconomical to serve, he said. But technology should widen the frontier of formal credit, not merely make existing lending faster.
“Credit decisions affect households for years. The objective cannot simply be to make credit faster. It must also be to make credit better,” the deputy governor said.
In 2025, RBI issued digital lending guidelines, and on Friday Murmu said the regulator had consolidated the framework around a straightforward principle: technology may change the channel through which credit is delivered, but it does not dilute the responsibility of the regulated lender.
“Borrowers must know who is lending to them, what the loan costs and what its terms are. Technology should widen customer choice rather than steer customers towards unsuitable products,” he said. While partnership models are valuable, the regulated entity remains accountable for services delivered.
“To put it plainly: technology can distribute a service, but it cannot distribute responsibility.”
Four risks
On UPI, or Unified Payments Interface, Murmu said that while its daily transaction count rivals those of the largest global card networks, a payment system that has become integral to commerce and daily life at this scale carries consequences far beyond an individual transaction when an outage or security incident occurs.
He pointed to four issues.
The first is operational resilience. Payment systems operate non-stop, so institutions must design for stress, not just normal operations.
The second is cyber resilience. Cybersecurity is no longer merely an IT issue but an enterprise-wide and increasingly ecosystem-wide risk, in which vulnerabilities in one participant can affect many others. It must be built proactively rather than reconstructed after an incident, Murmu said.
The third is fraud prevention. “Fraud must increasingly be treated as an ecosystem problem, requiring cooperation across banks, payment system operators, fintechs, telecom providers and law enforcement,” he said.
The fourth is customer protection. Speed reduces the time available to detect and reverse fraud or error. Customer awareness, effective grievance redressal, transaction monitoring and appropriate authentication remain non-negotiable.
Murmu added that when a genuine payment is blocked, how quickly the customer regains access to her money is as much a test of the system as the block itself.
Similar risks, similar rules
On fintech regulation, Murmu said that in a payments landscape that changes continuously, RBI’s approach has focused on strengthening governance standards, technology and security requirements, customer protection and operational resilience.
RBI’s principle, he said, is that similar activities creating similar risks should, wherever appropriate, face similar regulatory treatment.
“The objective is not to make every fintech resemble a bank, but to ensure that where an entity performs a critical financial function, the risks arising from it are appropriately managed and, where necessary, regulated,” said Murmu.
