Authored by Mihir Kshirsagar, Jeremy McKey, and Felix Chen
On November 5, 2025, Princeton CITP and the M.S. Chadha Center for Global India (CGI), in partnership with AfricaNenda, will convene an interactive workshop at the Global DPI Summit 2025 to examine the difficult trade-offs governments face when designing national payment systems. The session, Hard Choices in Designing Payment Systems, will bring together policymakers, regulators, payment system operators, fintech leaders, development practitioners, and researchers to investigate key tensions through structured questions and cross-sector dialogue.
Policymakers across the Global South are designing and deploying national payment systems that aim to be “instant” and “inclusive.” They also want to promote innovation and market competition; establish robust systems for recourse and fraud detection; and advance broader national priorities around digital sovereignty. Achieving all these goals simultaneously requires making difficult decisions. The workshop will examine four central questions:
Who should governments rely on to build payment systems? The choice between private vendors, digital public goods, or government-built infrastructure involves trade-offs around control, cost, speed of deployment, and long-term sustainability.
When do the goals of market competition and financial inclusion stand in tension? When are they complementary? Low-cost or zero-fee transactions can expand access but may undercut incentives for private sector innovation and investment.
When does speed stand in tension with the goals of building robust recourse and fraud detection systems? Real-time payments create new consumer experiences but may compromise the time needed for effective fraud prevention and dispute resolution.
How should policymakers think about cross-border interoperability? Countries must weigh the benefits of connecting to regional and international payment networks against goals of digital sovereignty and domestic control.
These aren’t hypothetical puzzles. The decisions governments make—about who owns payment rails, how identity systems work, and who can access citizen data—will shape market structure for decades. Yet these decisions are often framed as purely technical, obscuring the political and economic stakes beneath these architectural choices.
A Research Agenda on Digital Public Infrastructure
This workshop is part of a broader research initiative at CITP and supported by CGI analyzing the new infrastructure of the digital economy. There is an unprecedented effort by governments, especially in the Global South, to proactively build digital infrastructure that supports economic development. The term increasingly used to describe these efforts is “digital public infrastructure” (DPI).
DPI envisions publicly-funded digital platforms based on the technical principles of interoperability, scalability, and modularity. This approach has profound implications for the architecture of our digital future, the relationship between citizens and states, and the distribution of power among governments and industry players. India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) illustrates this new approach: the government built open payment rails that any app can plug into, mandated interoperability between banks, and enabled real-time settlement. The result: UPI now processes over 20 billion transactions monthly—more volume than Visa and Mastercard combined.
DPI’s rise surfaces fundamental tensions about digital market governance that we will examine closely in the coming years:
Public infrastructure or state control? Proponents frame DPI as democratizing access to digital services. Critics worry it concentrates power in government hands and creates new dependencies. The distinction depends on governance mechanisms that vary significantly across implementations.
Competition or coordination? Open infrastructure can enable competitive markets—Brazil’s Pix spawned hundreds of competing payment apps. But it can also facilitate coordination that can create dominant positions for early movers.
Sovereignty or interoperability? DPI emphasizes domestic control, but digital commerce crosses borders. How do national infrastructure projects interface with global flows? The question becomes urgent as cross-border payments and data exchange expand.
These tensions play out in specific design choices: Who can access the infrastructure? What data gets collected? How are costs allocated? Which technical standards prevail? Whether DPI delivers on objectives of growth, competition, and inclusion depends on choices about design, governance, and implementation being made right now.
Digital Rails Substack
Our new research blog, Digital Rails, explores these tensions in more detail. This year, we focus on the financial sector, where new models of payment systems are rewiring how billions of dollars flow every day. We’ll analyze performance in practice, map competing interests, and trace implications for development, competition, and innovation. A growing community of scholars is beginning to develop frameworks for measurement, gather evidence of economic impacts, and articulate new standards and guardrails. We’re writing as we learn, and we’ll share work in progress. Follow our research at Digital Rails.
The workshop at the Global DPI Summit represents CITP’s continued commitment to creating spaces where difficult questions in technology policy can be examined through structured dialogue across sectors and geographies.
Mihir Kshirsagar directs Princeton CITP’s technology policy clinic, where he focuses on how to shape a digital economy that serves the public interest. Drawing on his background as an antitrust and consumer protection litigator, his research examines the consumer impact of digital markets and explores how digital public infrastructure can be designed for public benefit.
Felix Chen is a researcher interested in examining societal impacts of artificial intelligence, technology-enabled access to justice, and digital public infrastructure. Previously, as a volunteer for the Massachusetts Small Claims Advisory Service, Chen developed technical tools aimed at improving public access to legal information.
Jeremy McKey is a Policy Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation, where his research explores the political economy of digital public infrastructure. He is particularly interested in the evolving role of central banks in shaping digital payment systems, especially in middle powers such as India, Brazil, and South Africa.
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