Meta’s $900-million investment in Indian fintech platform, CRED, comes with an important assurance: Meta will not gain access to CRED users’ financial data merely because it has acquired a minority (20%) stake. That clarification seeks to address immediate privacy concerns and reflect the basic safeguards embedded in India’s Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023. Yet the episode raises a larger public policy question. If the law can regulate the transfer of personal data, is it equally equipped to govern the concentration of economic power built around financial data, digital ecosystems and artificial intelligence?

India’s digital payments architecture has rightly been celebrated as a public policy success. Through the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), the country built interoperable payment infrastructure that prevented platform dominance from translating into payments dominance. WhatsApp Pay’s limited success despite its massive user base illustrates that open public infrastructure can preserve competition.

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Financial data occupies a unique position in the digital economy because it captures not what people say or search, but how they earn, spend, borrow and........

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