Artificial intelligence has become the equivalent of table stakes for fintech startups in India as companies race to deploy agentic interfaces for merchants and internal workflows, according to Business Standard. Major fintech players including Paytm, Pine Labs, Razorpay, Cashfree and Juspay are now deploying AI agents across merchant and internal operations, with most offerings still in beta or testing phases. In June, payments major Pine Labs rolled out agentic payment protocol P3P for autonomous transactions on select merchants, while Paytm is working on agentic solutions for its merchants. Fintech companies such as Cashfree Payments, Juspay, and Razorpay have already rolled out agentic interfaces for merchants, with AI interfaces now able to automate tasks such as following up on abandoned carts, retrying failed payments, and making product catalogues discoverable inside customer-facing AI interfaces.
Companies are already witnessing visible impact from AI adoption on their businesses, with potential for higher margins through improved operational efficiency. Madhur Deora, president and group CFO of Paytm, stated that AI structurally accelerates operating leverage and expands opportunities for higher margins over time, as reported by Business Standard. Amrish Rau, CEO of Pine Labs, revealed that at least four divisions of Pine Labs, 90% of all new code is now being written using AI, with the company seeing great demand in the Indian market, especially on the agentic payment side. The growing adoption of frontier AI models is improving productivity, with a greater share of code now being written with AI assistance.
Despite the widespread deployment of AI agents, monetisation remains nascent as most offerings are still being tested, according to Business Standard. Companies are taking a cautious approach to pricing due to additional cost considerations. A technology chief at a large payments company noted that rising server costs due to memory demand are affecting broader AI ambitions, with retail costs suddenly increasing for companies that have already procured servers. To level the playing field, companies are exploring outcome-linked pricing where charges are tied to metrics such as successful cart conversions, disputes resolved favourably, or collections completed through the interface. This approach aligns with Cashfree's earlier plans to introduce outcome-based pricing in the future, as reported by Business Standard.
The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is building a new standard for agentic payments on the country's real-time payments rails Unified Payments Interface (UPI), as reported by Business Standard. The new protocol for the agentic world is expected to be called Unified Agentic Protocol (UAP) and is being designed to create a trusted, common, interoperable infrastructure through which AI agents can be registered, verified, and authorised to transact across the UPI ecosystem without changing the underlying rails of the payments system. This development follows Cashfree's earlier targeting of ₹20,000 crore in lost gross merchandise value (GMV) through AI agents that can nudge customers likely to abandon transactions.
