The system has opened up for small investors as well as global private equity. The challenge is turning access into lasting economic gains. By Anto Antony Barely a generation ago, India was a place where capital was scarce and household wealth overwhelmingly flowed into banks, gold and property. Today global private equity firms deploy billions of dollars at a time in the country, and venture capitalists have financed companies worth tens of billions.

Digital infrastructure has put banking, payments and investing within reach of people the formal financial system struggled to serve. The next part may be harder: India must turn the new money and access to its markets into globally important companies. And it still needs to broaden income and household wealth.

asked four people who occupy very different places in this new world how they think Indian finance needs to change over the next decade. Their answers have been edited for clarity and length.

Lalit Keshre“India still has a huge access problem in finance. We have 1.4 billion people spread across very different geographies, speaking different languages and earning very different incomes. For a traditional financial institution, there were always millions of people who were simply too expensive to reach and serve. Technology keeps changing those economics. Payments showed what can happen when the cost of distribution collapses. The next big opportunity is in investing, financial advice and credit. Artificial intelligence could change the economics again. A good financial adviser may be able to look after 20 or 30 people properly. If AI can do much of the routine work — understand a portfolio, answer questions, flag what needs attention and personalize information — that same adviser could potentially serve 1,000.

“But the bigger opportunity goes beyond getting more Indians to buy stocks and mutual funds. Indians already have enormous wealth; much of it sits in physical assets such as gold and property. Think about a shopkeeper who owns his shop and needs money to expand. If ownership records and valuations become reliable and digitally verifiable, a lender can understand that asset and make a credit decision much more easily.”

Tuhin Parikh“The Indian market matured much faster than many people expected. That doesn’t mean returns disappear. It means you have to work harder for them. The biggest change is in how investors think about India. They no longer ask whether India is investable or whether exits exist. The questions now are the same ones investors ask in developed markets: What are the returns? How resilient are they? Can you execute?

“That makes discipline even more important. Nothing is a runaway [success] in India. The market rewards endurance and staying power. You wait for regulatory clarity, and then you deploy with conviction. You also have to know what to watch when things are going well. For me there are two warning signs: inflation that begins to hurt consumer demand, and asset prices rising much faster than the fundamentals underneath them.”

Shailendra Singh“Around 2015 we started tracking how many companies in our portfolio had at least $100 million in annual revenue. There were only two or three. Today, even after years of exits, we have roughly 55.

“Multiple founders, though they may not say it publicly, have the ambition to build $100 billion valuation companies from India. That changes the mathematics of venture capital. Something else is changing: who supplies the capital. Indian family offices and domestic funds are already sharing cap tables [lists of company ownership] with us. Look at India’s 100 largest companies by market value today. Only two or three are venture-backed technology or consumer companies. If I were a betting person, I think that could be somewhere between a quarter and half over the next decade or so.”

“Getting a loan is easier now. Earlier it was much harder. I have some land, and because I have that land, the bank was willing to give me money against it. It was the first time in my life I had taken a loan like this. But a loan has to be paid back every month. I work on other people’s farms. If there is work, I go. If there is no work, I stay home. In a good month, I can earn around 20,000 rupees, but there is no guarantee that every month will be a good month. When the rains are heavy, there is less work in the fields. Getting a loan is easier now. Earning enough to repay it is still hard.”