Cyber Hygiene and Secure-by-Design Infrastructure Key to Building Trust in AI-Powered Financial Services

By:- Kiran Gopinath, Chief Innovation Officer, Sahamati and Head of Sahamati Labs,

“Building a culture of cyber hygiene in the age of AI requires us to think beyond individual users and organisations to the digital infrastructure we are collectively building. As India’s digital public infrastructure expands into AI-powered financial services, cybersecurity must be embedded at every layer: protecting sensitive financial data during processing, ensuring AI agents operate within clearly defined permissions, and securing the software systems on which they depend. As India’s Account Aggregator ecosystem scales, with nearly 600 million fulfilled consents as of September 2026, trust must be built into the architecture itself, not treated as an afterthought. At Sahamati Labs, we have developed a proof of concept for a control and security plane for the AA framework using confidential computing and are beginning to pilot it. A culture of cyber hygiene for the AI era must combine responsible user behaviour with secure-by-design infrastructure, so that innovation can scale without compromising data privacy, accountability or consumer trust.”