How Cashfree Payments Showcased AI-Powered Product Innovations at GFF 2025

At the Global Fintech Festival 2025, Mumbai, we launched the new generation of AI-powered products made to simplify how India pays, collects, and onboards. Over the three action-packed days of this week, our booth became a hub of hands-on innovation showcases, insightful conversations and fresh thinking around the future of financial technology in the country and beyond. 

We brought together partners, regulators, technology leaders and industry veterans to explore how smarter infrastructure, better user experience and stronger compliance can move the digital economy forward.

Let’s take you through a quick recap of how GFF 2025 went.

The Booth That Brought Ideas to Life

Inspired by GFF’s theme this year, “Empowering Finance for a Better World Powered by AI”, our booth was anchored around an illuminated Payment Cortex. The booth reflected the intelligence, speed, and trust behind modern payments. At the heart of it was our experience zone, where visitors engaged with live demos of our AI-powered innovations. We created a space that went beyond product showcases and turned innovation into something tangible that visitors could see, feel, and participate in.

Adding to the energy was one of the biggest crowd-pullers of the event, the Blink2Pay Photo Booth. Visitors lined up to experience a mock checkout that simulated Cashfree’s biometric payment innovation. After “completing” their payment with a simple face scan, they stepped into the booth to instantly capture and print their GFF 2025 memory photo.

Showcasing the AI-Powered Future of Payments

Beyond the immersive booth, the product breakthroughs unfolded on the global stage as we unveiled more than 16 new launches, each reimagining a different layer of finance, from infrastructure to experience and from identity to risk.

• BlinkToPay: India’s first native in-app biometric card payment, completing transactions in under two seconds using face or fingerprint authentication, turning payments into pure motion.
• CardLink: Developed in partnership with CRED, CardLink brings device tokenisation to life by letting users save their card once and pay across any Cashfree-powered checkout without manual entry. With over two million cards already linked through CRED, it marks the beginning of a connected future where every card transaction is fast, secure, and effortless
• UPI ReservePay: Together with National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), we have launched UPI Reserve Pay (Single Block Multi-Debit). It lets customers block funds once and pay multiple times, combining the assurance of One-Time Mandate with the flexibility of Autopay, minus the friction of wallets
• Interoperable UPI Mandates: We launched India’s first Interoperable UPI Mandates with NPCI, giving businesses the freedom to create, migrate, or import mandates without disrupting service. Break acquirer lock-in, minimise downtime, and keep EMIs, OTT subscriptions, utilities, and SIPs flowing seamlessly.
• VPAConnect (Customer-Level VPAs): VPAConnect generates a unique VPA or QR for each customer, ensuring instant reconciliation and eliminating manual follow-ups. We’re proud to partner with RBL Bank for this launch. 
• ScanToEMI: It lets customers access instant EMI options directly within UPI via RuPay Credit, driving higher average order values and real-time affordability.
• Checkout 2.0: Loads in 200 ms, predicts preferred payment modes, applies offers automatically, and recovers failed transactions through smart retries, turning checkout into a growth lever.
• Video KYC by Secure ID: Supports 35+ Indian languages and deepfake detection through a fully agentless flow, reducing costs and expanding access for Tier-2 and Tier-3 users.
• Atlas by Secure ID: A unified AI onboarding and risk agent with 15+ contextual intelligence protocols for biometrics, fraud, consent, and compliance, all in one SDK.
• RiskShield Suite: Now evolved into total fraud protection with Dispute Defender, Chargeback Protection, and advanced machine-learning models that secure every transaction from fraud to recovery.
• UPI Switch (In-house): Built entirely by Cashfree, the new UPI Switch processes 12,000+ transactions per second to ensure near-zero downtime during national-scale peaks like IPL or festive rushes.
• UPI Acquiring Switch: A cloud-native acquiring layer for banks to power all UPI flows like Collect, Autopay, Mandates, QR, TPV, refunds, and payouts, enabling faster onboarding and 99.99% reliability.
• Card Acquiring Switch: In-house and EVMCo-certified for direct network connectivity, reducing authentication failures by 25% and bringing faster access to card innovations.
• Banking Connect: We became one of the first payment aggregators working with NBBL (Bharat Connect) to bring the Interoperable NetBanking initiative to life through Banking Connect. This launch delivers faster, mobile-first journeys with biometric authentication, unified processes, and better uptime, making NetBanking simpler, smarter, and truly interoperable for India’s digital economy.
• Banking Connect Switch: Our Banking Connect Issuing Switch helps banks bring interoperable Net Banking to life with a ready-to-deploy infrastructure to meet RBI and NPCI interoperability mandates and empowers banks to be compliance-first with enterprise-grade infra allowing faster interoperability roll-outs to merchants.
• Valid Handles (Verified UPI IDs): Launched in line with SEBI directives and supported by ecosystem partners, Valid Handles introduce verified UPI IDs for SEBI-registered intermediaries. These standardised, trusted UPI handles set a new benchmark for investor protection, ensuring every transaction reaches the right intermediary while reducing fraud risk across the ecosystem.
• UPI CreditLine Issuing Switch: We unveiled UPI CreditLine Switch, built in collaboration with NPCI, enabling banks and lending companies to issue credit lines directly on UPI.
  
  Built in partnership with India’s top banks, merchants, and networks, these innovations strengthen the digital rails and intelligence powering the future of payments. Check out this blog to know about our new launches.

Powering Global Payments, Together with J.P. Morgan

At GFF 2025, we teamed up with J.P. Morgan, marking a new chapter in cross-border enablement. 

Represented at the event by Christine (Jang) Tan (Head of FIG Sales APAC, Payments), Guhaprasath Rajagopal (MD, India Head, Payments), and Sonali Shelke (Executive Director- India Fintech lead ) from JPMC, alongside our CRO Harsh Gupta, the partnership signals a shared commitment to building compliant, scalable, and transparent payment solutions for global enterprises operating in India.

Voices Shaping the Future of Fintech

As India’s fintech landscape enters a new phase of maturity, our leaders shared insightful perspectives on how technology, regulation, and intelligence can come together to build a more resilient, compliant, and inclusive financial ecosystem at the GFF 2025. Each session reinforced our mission to advance industry dialogue and help define the next wave of fintech innovation.

• Scaling Indian Innovation Globally: Akash Sinha, our CEO & Co-Founder, shared how Indian payment aggregators can take their innovations global by aligning ambition with local context.
• Leveraging Next-Gen Identity Signals to Combat Modern Fraud: Reeju Datta, our Co-Founder, explored how AI-driven identity signals can strengthen fraud prevention in digital onboarding. 
• Cross-Border Fireside Chat: How Global Merchants Can Win With Indian Customers: Hosted at Cashfree’s booth, this fireside chat moderated by Harsh Gupta, our CRO, featuring Akhil Devmurari (Executive Director & Head for APAC FinTechs, J.P. Morgan), Sonali Shelke (Executive Director, J.P. Morgan), and Suprita Sarkar (Financial Partnerships, Stripe India), on enabling compliant, scalable cross-border commerce.
• Global Fintech Awards 2025: Arun Tikoo, our CBO, joined the jury at the Global Fintech Awards 2025, celebrating innovation and impact across India’s financial ecosystem.
• LLM Payments Model for Frictionless Agentic Payments: In a product showcase session, Lavika Aggarwal, our Group Product Manager,  showcased how AI agents can go beyond chat, code, or creation and finally enable payments. By orchestrating seamless interaction between shopping agents, applications, and our own Cashfree Payments Agent, the model allows transactions to happen right within conversations  with no pop-ups, no redirects. Just smooth, compliant, and context-aware payment flows powered by agentic AI. This breakthrough enables biometric-authenticated card payments and UPI payments via ReservePay by NPCI, bringing conversational payments to life.

Conclusion

What unfolded at GFF was the culmination of months of planning, problem-solving, and building together with purpose. But this is only the beginning. With a strong foundation in place, we are already working toward the next wave of cutting-edge products and experiences.

Stay tuned as bigger breakthroughs are on the way.