From DPI to Real-World Impact: Finarkein Analytics CEO Nikhil Kurhe on Building India’s Digital Future Beyond Compliance

From powering India’s digital rails to enabling sector-specific innovation, Finarkein Analytics is evolving with the country’s maturing digital economy. In this exclusive interaction with StartupTalky, Nikhil Kurhe, Co-founder and CEO, Finarkein Analytics, shared how the company is moving beyond building Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) to supporting high-impact use cases in finance, health, and commerce. Finarkein is helping Financial Institutions (FIs) shift from compliance-driven adoption to real-world application, especially in onboarding, servicing, and data management. Kurhe also discussed their approach to health data under the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM), with a strong focus on trust, seamless integration, and early adoption.

StartupTalky: Finarkein has been at the forefront of enabling DPI-led transformation. How do you see your role evolving as India moves from foundational digital rails to application-level innovation across sectors like finance, health, and commerce?

Mr. Kurhe: As with any large platform shift, whether it’s AI or earlier technological revolutions, we often see initial value being demonstrated at the platform level. However, real value capture tends to move quickly to the application layer. You can see this in how large language models (LLMs) are now giving rise to high-utility applications like Perplexity, Cursor, or Windsurf (which was recently acquired by OpenAI).

Similarly, while Finarkein has played a foundational role in building and enabling India’s DPI infrastructure, we see ourselves increasingly moving toward building or supporting high-value applications across sectors, be it finance, health, or commerce. This could mean developing these products organically or acquiring them strategically. As India’s digital economy matures, we’re keen to create meaningful value in sector-specific use cases layered on top of the digital public infrastructure we’ve helped shape.

StartupTalky: Beyond the number of financial institutions integrated, what kinds of use cases have seen the most traction, and how are you enabling FIs to move beyond compliance to real innovation?

Mr. Kurhe: We see adoption clustering across three key phases: origination, servicing, and management. Initially, most players began with origination use cases like substituting traditional bank statement uploads with account aggregator (AA) data for onboarding or underwriting. Then came servicing, where we led early efforts with use cases in collections, which is something now being actively adopted across the industry.

Now, we're seeing growing traction in the management layer. This includes deeper integration of AA data with internal systems like CRMs, loan management platforms, or policy administration systems in insurance. These help institutions operationalise data far more effectively.

Additionally, with the Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDPA) coming into focus, we’re working with clients to ensure that consented data is being used responsibly by implementing data retention protocols and enabling internal compliance monitoring.

StartupTalky: Consent volume is one indicator of scale, but what are some lesser-known impact metrics or success stories that best illustrate Finarkein’s role in powering meaningful financial inclusion or better customer experiences?

Mr. Kurhe: One compelling metric we track, and one that’s underappreciated industry-wide, is repeat usage. When users return to AA-based flows, even when given a choice between traditional and AA-led options, that signals not just utility but trust and a superior experience.

We’ve seen significantly higher repeat usage among institutions powered by Finarkein, and we attribute this to the simplicity and reliability of the experience, both from our platform and the financial institutions we partner with.

Another area we’re excited about is serving underserved business segments. While most AA implementations have focused on banking data, we’re now seeing traction in combining banking, GST, and other asset data. 

StartupTalky: Many large institutions are wary of long onboarding cycles. What have you done to streamline go-live timelines, and what’s the fastest enterprise deployment Finarkein has enabled so far?

Mr. Kurhe: We’ve worked with two broad categories of clients: traditional enterprises and high-growth fintechs, and the pace of deployment varies accordingly. For fintechs, we’ve achieved contract-to-go-live timelines as short as 3-4 weeks. In contrast, traditional enterprises may take anywhere from a month to 5-6 months, depending on internal compliance, legal, and IT processes.

To accelerate deployment, we’ve invested in:

• A robust suite of certifications, including ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type II, and cloud security standards.
• Pre-configured templates and deployment checklists to eliminate friction.
• Introducing pre-production environments for clients to test features in near-production conditions, supporting continuous integration and delivery without impacting end consumers.

We recently piloted this setup with a large consumer brand entering fintech, helping them go through multiple cycles of rapid development and testing while maintaining an excellent end-user experience.

StartupTalky: With DPI adoption accelerating and regulators encouraging interoperability, what does the future of consent-based data sharing look like, and how are you preparing to meet the demands of exponential data flow?

Mr. Kurhe: The future is clearly headed toward a data-rich, consent-driven ecosystem, but most BFSI systems today aren’t architected to handle the volume, complexity, and contextual specificity of this data.

We're preparing for this in several ways:

• Building a vertically decoupled data platform that separates different layers, allowing different internal teams to work with consented data independently and efficiently.
• Ensuring the platform is sector-agnostic and source-flexible. We already serve clients across finance and health, and support multiple data sources beyond AA.
• Supporting internal teams with tools that help them derive value from data without disrupting existing workflows.

Our goal is to create a data backbone that can scale with the demands of exponential data flow while also being able to maintain compliance, security, and speed.

StartupTalky: As the ABDM stack matures, how is Finarkein tailoring its approach for health data compared to financial data, and what do you think is key to unlocking early adoption in this space?

Mr. Kurhe: Health data, governed by the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) framework, brings its own set of sensitivities and standards. Our approach here focuses on two things:

1. Ensuring early adopters like hospitals, healthtech companies, and insurers understand the capabilities and compliance features of our platform.
2. Staying engaged with regulators and standards bodies, so we have a seat at the table as the ecosystem evolves. We actively contribute feedback and adapt our tools to align with evolving health data protocols.

The key to early adoption lies in trust and interoperability, and an integrated, verticalised end-to-end solution. 

StartupTalky: How did your time at CIIE.CO’s Financial Inclusion Lab helps shape Finarkein’s philosophy toward product development or ecosystem contribution? Are there frameworks or insights you still use from that phase?

Mr. Kurhe: Our time at the Financial Inclusion Lab was important in instilling a customer-first mindset, which is something that continues to shape how we build and deliver products. One of the key takeaways was just how underrated it is to talk to customers meaningfully and consistently. The Lab, especially through our work with MSC (MicroSave Consulting), pushed us to go beyond regulatory mandates and really understand the ground-level challenges and awareness gaps around frameworks like account aggregators.

It helped us ask the right questions: Who exactly is our customer? What specific pain points are we solving? How do we move from regulatory compliance to real-world outcomes? That gap between availability and usability became a focal point in our product thinking.

The Lab also played a crucial role in helping us approach pricing, like how to strike a balance between value creation and industry affordability. While we’ve had to reinvent some of those methods as the market has evolved, the core processes and philosophical approach still hold. Over time, the context has changed, but the emphasis on listening, testing, and iterating remains central to how we operate.

StartupTalky: With several players now active in the AA TSP landscape, what’s Finarkein’s competitive edge, and how do you see your position evolving in a market that’s both cooperative and competitive?

Mr. Kurhe: Our edge has always been in our product and in how effectively we scale value for our customers, not necessarily in being the first to onboard. In fact, we’ve often entered as the second or third TSP, but still ended up becoming the primary partner by capturing a majority of the wallet share. That comes from striving for product-market fit and solving for real usage, not just integration.

As the AA ecosystem matures, we expect this dynamic to continue. There's still a long road ahead in terms of active usage and meaningful penetration. Our focus is on what happens after landing an account: how we expand adoption, embed value, and generate measurable outcomes for the customer.

What’s also interesting is the evolving power dynamic in the ecosystem. As the market matures, we're seeing technology service providers (TSPs) become the key drivers of value creation, even more so than the AAs themselves. TSPs are increasingly acting as price setters, whereas AAs have become more like price takers. This shift is introducing new game-theory dynamics that blend competition with collaboration. And Finarkein’s approach is to lean into that complexity with strong products, sharp execution, and a long-term view of ecosystem enablement.