AI x FinTech: Voice, Agents & Year 1 in a Decade of Change | SummitUp by Elevation | Ep 16

"The entire payment industry was built to keep bots out. So what does it mean to actually allow agents to start transacting?" Welcome to a new episode of SummitUp! This time we dive into what happens when AI systems start touching money and the opportunity to build for it. In this episode Mridul Arora (Partner, Elevation Capital) sits down with Ashray Iyengar (Principal, Elevation Capital) and Vaas Bhaskar (Partner, Elevation Capital) to examine how AI is reshaping the distribution of financial products, how institutions operate, and how consumers interact with money. We discuss: How AI is transforming financial product distribution Why 20–25% of India's credit is still sold through DSAs and human agents and what AI-native distribution actually looks like when it augments that Why voice AI for BFSI will be built vertically, and why owning end-to-end workflows matters What agentic payments actually mean, why the entire payment stack needs to be rebuilt for a world where agents transact autonomously, and where the biggest opportunities sit across issuance, acquiring, pricing and fraud How financial institutions can use AI internally to get fighting fit across fraud, collections, credit operations and insurance underwriting and why change management is the hardest part Why the US accounting talent crisis is one of the biggest opportunities for India right now and what the two viable business models look like Whether this is finally the moment for personal finance management in India, and what the winning product will actually look like What never changes in fintech no matter how fast AI moves and why velocity and compliance are both accelerating at the same time CHAPTERS 00:00 Coming Up 01:22 Introduction 02:53 What's Changed In 18 Months? 05:18 Why Fintech AI Is Defensible 07:08 Year One Of A Decade 10:26 AI Native Distribution Explained 14:10 Building vs. Incumbents 18:07 Voice AI Thesis and Greylabs 20:41 Is Voice Winner Takes All? 22:45 Agentic Payments Framework 26:06 Concrete Agent Payment Use Cases 28:18 Making Financial Institutions Fighting Fit 33:19 Why Bank AI Is So Hard 35:30 India's Accounting Export Opportunity 40:58 Is This Finally PFM's Moment? 44:41 What The Concierge Looks Like 46:28 What Never Changes In Fintech