Meta’s decision to invest $900 million for a 20% stake in CRED, while appointing CRED founder Kunal Shah as global head of WhatsApp, has raised two concerns. First, American technology companies are gaining increasing control over India’s fintech sector and the vast financial data generated by Indian consumers. Second, many Indian fintech startups appear more interested in building companies for eventual sale to foreign buyers than in creating long-term Indian-owned digital champions.The Meta-CRED transaction comes at a time when India’s digital-payments ecosystem is increasingly dominated by platforms linked to US firms. Walmart controls about 72% of PhonePe, Google owns Google Pay, and Meta owns WhatsApp Pay. The proposed CRED investment would further strengthen the control of foreign technology giants in a sector built largely on Indian public digital infrastructure such as Aadhaar, UPI and India Stack.What makes the Meta-CRED deal particularly sensitive is the nature of the data involved. Founded in 2018, CRED has one of India’s richest repositories of consumer financial-behaviour data. Its roughly 17 million users provide information on credit cards, repayment records, spending patterns, bill payments, loans, investments, insurance purchases and increasingly UPI transactions. The company processes more than 40% of India’s credit-card bill payments, giving it a uniquely detailed view of the financial lives of affluent Indians.CRED may not provide access to customer data to Meta today, but we expect soon all of this data will be directly or indirectly be made accessible for Meta’s use which can further use/sell it for training AI models.India’s startup ecosystem has repeatedly seen domestic companies begin as independent ventures before gradually moving under foreign ownership. PhonePe offers a notable example. Founded by Indian entrepreneurs in 2015, it became part of Flipkart in 2016 and effectively came under Walmart’s control after Walmart acquired Flipkart in 2018. Observers worry that CRED could follow a similar path if Meta eventually increases its ownership stake.The strategic logic behind the investment is difficult to ignore. WhatsApp already reaches more than 500 million users in India. Since the National Payments Corporation of India removed onboarding limits on WhatsApp Pay in December 2024, Meta has been free to offer UPI-based payments across its entire Indian user base. The appointment of Kunal Shah to lead WhatsApp globally will help Meta expand beyond messaging into a broader financial-services ecosystem.Payments are likely only the first stage. Lending, insurance, wealth management, merchant services, and AI-driven financial products could follow. In such a model, financial data which CRED holds becomes the foundation for future growth.The contrast with China is striking. China built its digital-payments ecosystem through domestic champions such as Alipay and WeChat Pay, keeping ownership and strategic control within Chinese companies. India has allowed foreign firms to build dominant positions on top of public digital infrastructure.It risks transferring ownership of valuable financial-data assets to foreign-controlled ecosystems.The policy debate therefore extends well beyond a single investment. Regulators should require greater transparency from CRED and Meta on what “no access to customer data” specifically means, whether Meta will receive board representation, whether sharing of aggregated or anonymised data is prohibited, and how future joint products would handle user consent and data governance.The central issue is not whether Meta gains access to CRED’s data today. It is whether India is gradually allowing control over the financial data of millions of economically active citizens to migrate into foreign-owned digital ecosystems. The Meta-CRED deal may ultimately be remembered less as a funding round and more as a milestone in that transition.Ajay Srivastava is the founder of Global Trade Research Institute (GTRI).