Payments are entering a new era. AI is no longer just helping customers discover what to buy or helping businesses run their operations. It is beginning to act on their behalf, making decisions, initiating actions and, increasingly, completing payments.
At the 7th edition of the Global Fintech Fest, we are launching the infrastructure for that world. New rails that let an agent pay on a customer’s behalf. AI teammates that run payment operations end to end. A netbanking experience that finally matches UPI. And onboarding intelligence that catches risk before an account exists.
Let’s get started.
Agentic Management
Chasing dropped carts. Retrying failed payments. Screening refund claims. Filing disputes before the deadline. None of it is hard, all of it is endless, and it is usually being done by a number of people in the backend.
Four launches to take that work off them, each built on the same rule: nothing moves without your approval.
Relay
Relay is an AI teammate that runs payment operations, with specialist agents for cart recovery, failed payment retries, COD confirmation, subscription renewals, refund screening and dispute filing. The blog explains how the agents work off one shared memory, where an approval is required before money moves or a customer is contacted, and how one can set one up by describing the outcome in plain language.
Resolve
Most failed payments are not a customer changing their mind. They are a customer who tried to pay, hit something they did not understand, and is waiting for somebody to explain it. Resolve places an outbound AI voice call within a minute of the failure, names the specific reason, and offers a way to finish.
Spark
The answer to a payment question is already in your dashboard, sitting behind tabs and filters and somebody’s morning. Spark lives in the search bar and gives you the answer instead. Ask in your own language, and it reads your live account, then acts: creating payment links, building reconciliation reports, issuing refunds, initiating instant settlements.
Cashfree for Builders
AI already writes integration code, teams already works out of Claude or ChatGPT, and products already have an agent talking to customers. All three stop at payments. Cashfree for Builders closes those gaps with Agent Skills for your coding assistant, an MCP Server for your AI client, and an Agent Toolkit so the agent you are shipping can collect payments itself.
Netbanking
Netbanking still carries a serious share of India’s high-value payments because it is familiar and and carries the trust of millions. What it has lacked is an experience that matches the other pay modes.
Two launches close that distance.
Lien Marking on Banking Connect
Customers routinely pay for something before knowing whether they will actually get it. Lien Marking lets the customer block the amount in their own bank account instead, debited once the outcome is confirmed and released if it is not. Customers could already do this on UPI and cards. Now netbanking too
Third Party Validation on Banking Connect
Investing through netbanking has never been the smoothest experience. The customer is redirected to their bank, has to remember credentials to log in, and if any of it takes too long, the session times out and they start over. TPV on Banking Connect replaces all of it with a QR scan, or a single tap on mobile straight into the bank app.
Card and UPI Experiences
The smallest frictions at the moment of payment can lead to cart abandonment or payment failure. Cashfree launches four products to eliminate these issues and create a seamless payment experience.
UPI Third Party Validation with Google Pay
People must invest from a KYC-registered bank account, and picking the wrong one only fails after the PIN has been entered. Third Party Validation on UPI surfaces the KYC registered account at the top of the payment screen while the others are greyed out. This eliminates the selection of a wrong account.
Smart Order Retry
A mistyped PIN is one of the few payment failures that has nothing to do with a customer’s intent or ability to pay. Smart Order Retry, built with Google Pay, preserves that intent by keeping the eligible order open so the customer can enter the correct PIN and complete the same payment, without creating a duplicate transaction or being charged twice.
Card Link
The first purchase on every new website still asks for sixteen digits, an expiry and a CVV. Card Link uses device tokens rather than merchant-bound ones, so a card saved once on a payment app arrives ready at any Cashfree-powered checkout, including for a first-time visitor. Live with CRED and Google Pay.
Passkeys
Card authentication still depends on an OTP arriving. Cashfree introduces Passkeys that replace that step with the biometrics already on the customer’s device, built on global FIDO standards and now supported by Visa, Mastercard and RuPay. A card payment can now be done with a face scan or a fingerprint.
Checkout
Checkout360
Most checkout products are built to help a customer finish paying. However, Checkout360 is built around the four things a growing D2C brand actually cares about: fewer drop-offs, COD that stays profitable, a larger order, and a checkout customers trust. It also covers how it fits into a stack a brand has already built.
International Payments
Global Travel Payments
Indians are travelling abroad in growing numbers, and global travel merchants are still losing them at the final step. Most sell into India on international cards, which many Indian cards are not enabled for by default, and moving to local payment methods brings LRS compliance along with it. Global Travel Payments handles both, with compliance built into the checkout rather than bolted on after.
GIFT City
GIFT City’s tax question is settled and the capital is arriving, but a monthly overseas SIP is still a brand-new remittance every month, because nothing there does what an eNACH mandate does at home. The piece follows one such SIP to show what the settlement layer is still missing, and what a platform needs before setting up an entity.
Citibank as Banking Partner
Local payment methods have made it straightforward for a global business to win an Indian customer. What the customer never sees is everything after: collection, reconciliation, FX and remittance through India’s banking system, which is where the economics of the market are actually decided. Citibank joins Cashfree as an AD Category-I banking partner to strengthen that link.
Prepaid Wallets
Open Loop Prepaid Infrastructure
Employee benefits now span across food, fuel, medical, learning and telecom, which leaves employers juggling allocations and rules; and employees juggling instruments. Pazcard, built by Cashfree and Pazcare, puts all of it behind one open loop prepaid wallet and one digital card. Cashfree powers the layers underneath, from employee KYC and issuance through to controls and transaction processing.
Risk
Mule Sentinel
A mule account can pass every onboarding check. Aadhaar, PAN, face match and video KYC, because these checks establish who a customer is and not what they intend to do with the account. Mule Sentinel scores the applicant before the account exists, reading identity, telecom, digital and payment signals together, and shows a risk team exactly which signals did not add up.
