About IndiaBonds

IndiaBonds is India's leading online bond investment platform, a SEBI-registered Online Bond Platform Provider, that allows retail investors to invest in fixed-income instruments: corporate and state guaranteed bonds, government securities, and high-yield fixed deposits, that were traditionally reserved for institutions and large investors. The platform serves those looking for stable, predictable returns outside of equity markets, a segment that has long had to settle for low-yield options like traditional fixed deposits.

The Challenge

As a SEBI-regulated platform, IndiaBonds has to ensure that every payment originates from the bank account a customer registered during onboarding. This is Third Party Validation or TPV, a regulatory requirement ensuring that investments are funded only from verified, linked accounts. 

The problem for IndiaBonds was not with the regulation, but with how it played out in the UPI payment experience. When a customer opened their UPI app to complete an investment payment, all their linked bank accounts were displayed with no visual indication of which account (TPV-approved account) is registered with IndiaBonds. The customer would select an account, enter their PIN, and then the transaction would fail. 

At that point, the payment was lost and so was the conversion, through no fault of the customer or IndiaBonds.

This wrong-account selection accounted for 8% of total TPV-related failures

The Solution

Cashfree partnered with Google Pay and Paytm to bring TPV validation directly into the UPI app experience, enforcing account restriction before PIN entry and eliminating wrong-account selection at the source. 

Cashfree is currently the only Payment Gateway to offer this capability.

Now when a customer wants to make an investment on IndiaBonds and initiates a payment on Google Pay or Paytm, the UPI app surfaces only the registered account(s) with the platform . All other linked accounts are greyed out and cannot be selected with a clear message that the account is not registered with the broker, removing any possible confusion for the customer.

If the registered account is not yet linked to IndiaBonds, the customer is prompted to add it before proceeding. 

The validation happens upfront, before the customer ever enters their PIN, so there is no longer a scenario where a customer completes the payment flow only to have it fail at the last step. 

For a regulated investment platform like IndiaBonds, payment design must balance compliance, conversion, and customer experience. Cashfree helped us address a critical TPV challenge by moving bank-account validation upstream into the UPI payment journey itself.

The product experience now guides customers toward the correct registered bank account before they enter their UPI PIN, eliminating an avoidable failure point at the end of the transaction. From a technology perspective, the solution was particularly effective because it improved the payment flow without requiring changes to our existing payment gateway integration.

This combination of thoughtful product design, deep understanding of regulated payment flows, and seamless technical implementation has delivered an improvement of over 2% in our payment success rate. It is a strong example of how payments infrastructure can directly improve both customer experience and business outcomes.

Anand Sonawane, Director- IndiaBonds