Mumbai, Sept 10: The UIDAI has launched a new face authentication software development kit (SDK) designed to simplify Aadhaar authentication for partner institutions and reduce longstanding geofencing restrictions that have limited its use for Indians travelling and living overseas, said Shri Neelkanth Mishra, Chairman, Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), at the Global Fintech Fest (GFF) 2026, being held from September 8–11, at Jio World Centre, Mumbai.
GFF 2026 is organised by the Payments Council of India (PCI), the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) and the Fintech Convergence Council (FCC). The conference is supported by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY); the Department of Financial Services, Ministry of Finance; the New, Emerging and Strategic Technology (NEST) Division, Ministry of External Affairs; Niti Aayog; the Reserve Bank of India (RBI); the Securities and Exchanges Board of India (SEBI); the International Financial Services Centres Authority (IFSCA); and the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA).
Addressing a session titled “Digital Identity and Beyond,” moderated by Mr. Srinivas Jain, Executive President, SBI Funds, Shri Mishra explained that the new SDK will allow partner banks and businesses to run Aadhaar authentication locally on their own servers, rather than routing requests through UIDAI‘s central systems.
“The problem with removing geofencing is, then you are vulnerable,” he said. “It’s critical infrastructure. And of course, we see hundreds of attacks every day. We have safeguards.”
He described a model where authentication runs on the bank’s own server rather than UIDAI‘s central infrastructure, so the bank secures its own local process and the exposure doesn’t pass back to UIDAI‘s systems.
This comes as Aadhaar authentication volumes climb sharply from seven crore transactions a day a few years ago to roughly 10 crores today with UIDAI preparing infrastructure to handle 25 to 30 crore daily authentications. Shri Mishra noted that more than 600 entities currently use the platform, with the Aadhaar app nearing 6 crore downloads.
On growing institutional adoption, he said, “Telangana police is now insisting that a lot of the verification they do requires the Aadhaar app itself, and that gets people to download the Aadhaar app.”
On UIDAI‘s underlying philosophy, he added, “Aadhaar is only a database. We make sure that we are very good at what we do, but we also don’t want any scoping. We must be good at having the identity data of 1.44 billion and provide it in a safe, secure, and trusted way. We would like to become the infrastructure that no one knows.”
Speaking at the session, Mr. Jitendra Gupta, Founder and CEO, Jupiter, said, “I must admit that Aadhaar has been one of the biggest boons for the fintech industry and the value they create in terms of solving for customer experiences.” He pointed out that Aadhar has reduced friction in customer onboarding and aided in digital first experiences.
