The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has partnered with the Digital India BHASHINI Division (DIBD) to explore the use of multilingual artificial intelligence and language technologies for improving access to investor education, financial information and regulatory services across India.
The two organisations signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on November 3, 2026, in Mumbai. The agreement brings together India's capital markets regulator and the government-backed language technology initiative to address communication barriers faced by investors who are more comfortable using regional Indian languages.
Editorial Insight
Key Highlights
Important points readers should notice.
Issue/Event: SEBI and BHASHINI sign an agreement to improve multilingual access to financial information.
Location: India.
Authority/Organisation: Securities and Exchange Board of India and Digital India BHASHINI Division.
Action Taken: Signed an MoU to explore AI-based translation, speech recognition, text-to-speech and OCR solutions.
- Impact: Aims to improve investor education and make financial information more accessible across regional-language communities.
The MoU was signed by Amitabh Nag, Chief Executive Officer of the Digital India BHASHINI Division, and Sandip Pradhan, Whole-Time Member of SEBI, in the presence of senior officials from both organisations.
Under the agreement, SEBI will be able to use BHASHINI's language technology APIs, artificial intelligence models and digital tools to make its services and investor-related information more accessible in regional languages.
Four key language technologies
Editorial Analysis
Why This Matters
India's financial markets are attracting investors from different regions, educational backgrounds and linguistic communities. However, understanding investment products, market risks, regulatory requirements and complaint procedures can be difficult when information is available in languages that users do not comfortably understand. The SEBI–BHASHINI partnership could help reduce this communication gap by making financial information available through regional-language technology. For first-time investors, clearer explanations of market risks, investment products and regulatory services could support better-informed decisions. The initiative may also help improve financial awareness in rural areas and smaller cities, where language barriers can limit access to digital financial information. However, accurate translation of financial and legal terminology will be essential. Incorrect translations could create confusion about investment risks and regulatory obligations. The quality of the eventual services will therefore depend on testing, contextual language resources and appropriate human validation.
The collaboration will focus on four major technology capabilities.
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) can convert spoken language into text, potentially helping users access information through voice-based interactions.
Text-to-Speech (TTS) technology converts written information into spoken language, which may help investors who prefer listening to financial guidance rather than reading documents.
Machine Translation can help convert regulatory information, investor education material and other financial content into regional languages.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) can extract text from scanned documents and images, potentially supporting multilingual access to documents and digital services.
The agreement will also support the enhancement of BHASHINI's language models with securities-market-related terminology. This is important because financial and regulatory communication includes specialised words and concepts that may not translate accurately through general-purpose translation systems.
Focus on investor awareness and financial inclusion
The partnership is expected to support SEBI's investor education efforts, including its Project Jagrook – Samajh Se Investing Simple campaign.
SEBI Whole-Time Member Sandip Pradhan highlighted the importance of communicating financial information in languages that people understand comfortably. He referred to India's large investor base, including nearly 13 crore demat accounts and around 8 crore mutual fund investors, as a reason to strengthen financial awareness initiatives.
The collaboration is particularly relevant for people in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, rural communities and other areas where access to understandable financial information may be limited.
During a workshop held alongside the MoU signing, representatives of SEBI, BHASHINI and other stakeholders discussed possible applications of multilingual technology in investor services.
These included translating SEBI's website and digital services, making investor awareness videos and important documents available in regional languages, and exploring real-time speech-to-speech translation.
The discussions also covered multilingual access to SEBI forms and application processes, voice-based assistance through AI-enabled telephony and conversational AI interfaces that could help citizens understand investor-related services.
Improving financial language resources
Another important aspect of the agreement is the development of better regional-language resources for securities-market terminology.
Financial concepts such as market movements, profits, losses, rising markets and falling markets can be difficult to explain through direct word-for-word translation.
The workshop therefore discussed the use of familiar regional expressions and everyday examples to explain technical financial concepts.
The organisations also explored the potential of BHASHINI's BhashaDaan crowdsourcing platform to collect and validate regional financial terminology. Its guided digitisation workbench was discussed as a possible resource for preserving financial knowledge contained in documents, books, local narratives and traditional expressions.
According to the government announcement, BHASHINI currently supports 36 Indian text languages, 23 Indian voice languages and 35 international languages. It powers more than 800 government websites and has enabled over 9 billion cumulative AI inferences.
No immediate change to investment rules
The MoU marks the beginning of enhanced cooperation between SEBI and the Digital India BHASHINI Division. It does not introduce new securities-market regulations, change investment rules or modify investor obligations.
The announcement also does not specify a public launch date, a language-by-language implementation schedule or the first SEBI services that will receive the technology integration.
The practical benefits will depend on technical integration, translation accuracy, testing and the eventual rollout of services.
The partnership nevertheless represents an important step towards making financial information easier to understand and access across India's diverse linguistic communities.
