Speaking to CNBC-TV18 at the Global Fintech Fest (GFF) 2026, Managing Director and CEO Praveena Rai said the commodity exchange already has the basics covered — the products, the participants, the trading platform — but the real shift going forward will come from technology partnerships rather than the exchange going it alone.
“The next level of experiential change will come really from the magic of fintech,” Rai said.
Her comment came against the backdrop of MCX signing a fresh set of MoUs at GFF this week.
The centrepiece is a new industry body called the Commodity Market Innovation Council (CMIC), modelled loosely on existing groups like the Payments Council of India and the Fintech Convergence Council — both of which Rai has been involved with in the past.
The idea, she said, “We wish to bring together the right parties, the interested parties doing very cutting-edge and emerging work in the space of fintechs who are already in capital markets or interested to come into capital markets.”
Rai has a personal stake in GFF’s story too — she was part of the team that helped set it up, back when it started as a pandemic-era virtual event. Watching it grow into a global gathering over the past few years, she said, has been “fantastic and phenomenal,” and added that the event rewards people who engage with it seriously rather than just walking the floor.
On why fintech matters so much to an exchange like MCX, Rai’s argument was fairly simple: an exchange has to give every participant fair, equal, transparent access — that’s the regulatory baseline.
But the actual innovation, the stuff that changes how customers experience the market, tends to happen at the edges, where fintechs are free to experiment with things like data analytics and AI in ways an exchange itself typically can’t.
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