Fintech startups are gearing up for AI-powered commerce, linking digital payments with agentic platforms like ChatGPT and Claude. Fintech startups are hopping onto the artificial intelligence bandwagon as digital payments emerge as a critical linking point between search operations on AI-powered platforms and actual agentic commerce.
Payment aggregators like Razorpay and Cashfree, card networks such as Visa and Mastercard, and merchant payment processors including PayU and Pine Labs are all working towards integrating with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and other such platforms.
While end-to-end AI-based commercial transactions are not allowed by the Reserve Bank of India, digital payment companies are building the pipelines to ensure that they are ready once agentic commerce sees wide-scale adoption.
“As of now adoption is very low, but people are searching for merchandise on AI-powered apps. So, the next step is they will complete the transaction within those apps only; the payments industry is preparing for that,” said the chief executive officer of a large digital payment firm.
Payment processor Pine Labs announced that the company is integrating with Open AI’s ChatGPT to enable agentic commerce and also will help merchants enable such transactions on AI-powered applications.
“We will power merchants who want to be ready for commerce in an AI-powered world. Eventually we will also look to enable AI agents undertaking complete payment services,” Pine Labs CEO Amrish Rau said.
Pine Labs is looking to run experiments with AI agents undertaking complete transactions in Southeast Asia and the Gulf countries. Once the RBI opens up for agentic commerce, players will enable these payments in India too, Rau said.
Currently, UPI’s Reserve Pay is the only payment mechanism through which an AI agent can undertake a transaction, Razorpay CEO Harshil Mathur pointed out.
UPI Reserve Pay is a mechanism where consumers are allowed to set a transaction limit for any specific merchant on a UPI app. Subsequent transactions with that merchant within the limit can flow without an OTP.
“We are already live on Reserve Pay, this is a mode which is allowed by the RBI and where an agent can actually undertake the transaction on behalf of the customer without a second factor of authentication. For the other payment flows, human intervention is still needed,” Mathur told ET.
Card networks are pushing tokenised payments via AI agents, where the real card data remain masked and tokens can be stored with these AI platforms, thereby ensuring safety of transactions.
Gautam Aggarwal, president, India and South Asia at Mastercard, told ET that these payments were awaiting RBI approvals and it could take some more months to go live.
AI-powered commerce is still in a very nascent stage in India, industry insiders pointed out. Additionally, for card transactions to be enabled on AI systems, banks will need to come on board. So, the technology needs wider adoption and large industry players to come together.
“First merchants need to enable such payments, then consumers need to come in as well, only then will the flywheel be in place. As of now, the plumbing is being put in place,” Mathur of Razorpay said.
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