Saurabh Vijay, CEO, Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), during the Global Fintech Fest in Mumbai, India on Thursday, September 10, 2026 | Photo credit: Bloomberg/DHIRAJ SINGH
The Unique Identity Authority of India is working on plans to expand Aadhaar globally, particularly to enable non-resident Indians and foreign citizens of India to benefit from digital identity technology, a senior official of the digital identity body said on Thursday.
During a fireside chat at Global Fintech Fest 2026, UIDAI CEO Saurabh Vijay said his goal is to make the Aadhaar infrastructure best-in-class to facilitate global expansion of the platform.
“I think the focus in Aadhaar now is to make Aadhaar international. We really want to work on its interoperability – how to make that more possible. So, some PoC (proof of concept) is already happening.
“Our legal framework also aims (in this direction) to make Aadhaar international. We are working on policies to make it (available) to overseas citizens of India (OCI) so that it will generate more investment,” he said.
Vijay said that National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) launched three products at the event and some of them may go international.
UIDAI works closely with NPCI to authenticate financial transactions.
Vijay said UIDAI is working on guidelines to help small merchants perform Aadhaar-enabled authentication for the KYC (know your customer) process.
He said digital KYC using Aadhaar authentication has helped in streamlining customer registration and also reduced the registration time for UIDAI partners.
“We are working to shorten this entire journey and make it smoother with new products like Aadhaar Lite. Recommendations will be published very soon. Work on this is already underway,” Vijay said.
Published September 10, 2026