Will financial wellness be the next frontier for Indian fintech after UPI?

With financial instrument distributors staying away from servicing a ₹500 monthly Systematic Investment Plan (SIP) whose commission does not justify the customer acquisition cost of reaching a first-generation investor in a tier-two city and wealth platforms and digital brokerages focusing on tapping urban professionals and high-net-worth individuals, where the economics work,  a clutch of startups is now seen building what they call financial wellness platforms, products designed not to sell financial instruments but to improve a user’s overall financial health and it’s finding traction.

They are tapping into this vast left out “mass middle” — say, a schoolteacher in Lucknow, a self-employed trader in Coimbatore, or a young salaried couple in Nagpur — who have resorted to seeking recommendations from YouTube videos and government pamphlets. 

“This segment does not lack intent,” said Kumar Binit, CEO, airpay money, a financial wellness startup building for this demographic. 

“It lacks access to contextual, trustworthy, and guided financial decision-making. Nobody has ever sat down with them to explain what a mutual fund does, or why they need a nominee,” he pointed out. ”They are one medical emergency away from a financial crisis,” Mr Binit said adding, “That is exactly who we are building for.”

airpay money’s approach is to start with a diagnostic. A new user is walked through guided onboarding that maps their income, savings, insurance cover, and financial goals before any recommendation is made. 

The output is a Financial Health Score, a single number that tells the user where they stand today and what is missing. And then it recommends a personalised plan regarding what to address first, why it matters, and how to act on it.

The platform also works to make large financial concepts feel personally relevant. 

For example, global investing is not introduced as a sophisticated strategy but as a response to something most middle-class households have felt but never quantified. 

Additionally, insurance is not a conversation about premiums only anymore. It starts with a direct question: if you were hospitalised tomorrow, how many months could your family manage?

The business model too runs differently from mainstream fintech. Rather than earning from upfront product commissions, the platform earns when users, better informed about their own situation, eventually act on it.

“Trust at scale is a business model,” Mr Binit said. “We are not waiting for customers to become investors. We are helping them become financially resilient first,” he added.

Whether this model can generate returns at scale remains to be seen.

A 2024 survey by EY and the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) found that 96% of respondents in rural and semi-urban India wanted to save and invest. But more than half of them did not know how to manage their finances.

India’s financial inclusion index, as tracked by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), rose to 67 in March 2025, up from 43.4 in 2017. But the index measures access. It does not measure whether a family in Indore or Cuttack has a term plan, or whether a trader in Solapur or Hissar has set aside enough to survive a bad month.

Thus, there is a gap to be filled. 

In two to three years, airpay money is targeting 10 million users who have meaningfully improved their Financial Health Score. The measure of success, Mr Binit said, “is not assets under management. It is whether that number moves.”

Jan Dhan might have put 550 million Indians inside the financial system which is yet to work for them. 

A decade after Jan Dhan changed who could access the financial system, a new question is emerging: can fintech change how well they use it?