India’s digital banking revolution now demands a sharper focus on resilient banking in India. Deputy Governor Rohit Jain made this clear at the SBI Banking and Economic Conclave on September 24, 2026, in Mumbai. He argued that technology is no longer just a service delivery tool — it now shapes the very risk architecture of banking.
Technology and Cyber Risk: Key Concerns for Indian Banks
India’s UPI processed 24.9 billion transactions worth ₹30.15 lakh crore in August 2026 alone. That scale, however, brings serious responsibility. A single technology failure can, therefore, affect millions of customers and destabilise parts of the financial system. Deputy Governor Jain stressed that financial resilience and technological resilience must be treated as one.
He highlighted several global incidents to underline the point. The 2018 cyberattack on an Indian cooperative bank exposed weaknesses in payment interfaces. Additionally, the 2024 CrowdStrike outage showed how one faulty software update from a third-party provider can cripple critical services. As a result, banks must treat technology risk as a first-order enterprise risk — not a back-office concern.
Jain also warned about AI-enabled threats such as deepfakes, voice cloning and large-scale phishing. Meanwhile, he noted that the same AI tools can help banks detect fraud, monitor behaviour and respond to incidents faster. The key, however, is governance before scale.
What Resilient Banking Means for Customers and Institutions
Jain outlined ten requirements for stronger technology and cyber risk management. These include maintaining visibility across complex IT environments, managing third-party dependencies, and testing recovery arrangements regularly. For customers, a tech outage is not a system glitch — it is an inability to access their own money.
He also stressed data governance as a pillar of resilient banking in India. Poor-quality data feeding sophisticated models, he warned, produces only sophisticated-looking errors. Therefore, accuracy, integrity and recoverability of data must be treated as core elements of resilience.
Senior management and boards must develop sufficient technological understanding to question assumptions and evaluate risks. Technology may be outsourced, but accountability cannot be. Jain concluded that India must innovate quickly — but never blindly — and collaborate on security even while competing on innovation.
Source: RBI Speeches
