When graduate student Drew Newman went on vacation to India earlier this month, he found a nation in the throes of transformation. “Even in small cities, you’d see handwritten signs on tuk-tuks saying ‘We accept Paytm’ or another type of mobile payments system.”

It had been two months since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decision to remove 500 and 1,000 rupee notes from circulation—86% of the country’s overall currency—and the surprise shift in policy was still disrupting daily life for India’s 1.3 billion people, as well as foreign travelers. One day, Newman and his wife visited Kumbhalgarh Fort in Rajasthan. “The admission price was 400 rupees a person. I pulled out a 2,000 rupee note, and they didn’t have change,” he says. And yet, even as snaking lines continued to form at ATMs, “without exception everyone seemed to be happy.”

Interviews with business leaders in India confirm that impression: Citizens, by and large, see demonetization as an effective means to root out tax evasion and counterfeit currency, which has been linked to terrorism. Pundits in the U.S.—not to mention comics in India—have ridiculed the Reserve Bank of India for its management of the demonetization process. But Indians are looking beyond the short-term “cash chaos” and toward the policy’s longer-term benefits.

“They feel empowered,” says Karan Sharma, a director in the financial advisory group at Avendus Capital’s Mumbai office.

And so are technology companies. Digital wallet providers like MobiKwik and Freecharge have seen enormous jumps in activations; market leader Paytm, already well positioned thanks to its user engagement strategies and Alibaba backing, has gained 20 million customers. (As context, roughly the same number of Indians have a credit card of any kind.) In this first wave of adjustment, the big story has been local merchants’ adoption of digital payments point-of-sale solutions. On CNN, for example, a reporter visited a street food market and found snack-seekers buying samosas via QR code.

Yet digital wallets, and their effect on local vendors, are just the beginning. In the background, digital wallets are helping to construct an infrastructure that will better support credit and e-commerce, two areas in which India has been lagging behind Western economies and rival China.

Jainesh Sinha, COO of student loan startup GyanDhan, anticipates that his company will benefit in direct ways from the government’s new policy. In the past, families and friends would gather together thousands of dollars worth of cash to pay the tuition for a promising son or daughter’s college education (only 7% of Indian students take out educational loans, according to the Parthenon Group). Removing rupee notes from the system has made such arrangements more challenging.