Enables businesses to accept UPI, and passkey based biometric authentication for card payments directly within ChatGPT and Claude apps
Brings PCI-compliant, in-chat checkout to OpenAI Apps SDK and Anthropic MCP Apps
Bangalore, February 17, 2026: Furthering its mission to enable agentic commerce at scale, payments company Cashfree Payments today announced the launch of Cashfree Here, India’s first ever payments extension that brings transactions directly into AI-chat applications. Unveiled at India AI Impact Summit 2026, in collaboration with Mastercard and Swiggy, Cashfree Here enables businesses to accept payments natively inside conversational interfaces such as ChatGPT and Claude, marking a decisive shift in how AI-driven commerce is experienced. This comes on the heels of Cashfree’s recent launch of Agentic Payments which allowed Cashfree’s AI-agent to interact with merchant’s agents and take over the conversation with the customer for payment processing. With UI now being rendered in ChatGPT and Claude interfaces, Cashfree is bringing in the otherwise missing payments extension inside chat interfaces itself, creating an end to end AI-powered business ecosystem for merchants who want to launch and promote agentic commerce.
Commenting on the launch, Nitin Pulyani, SVP and Head of Product, Cashfree Payments said, “Every major shift in commerce has been defined by a new interface, from physical stores to websites, from mobile apps to super apps. We are now entering the era of AI conversations, where users don’t browse, they ask. Yet payments have remained stuck in older paradigms, forcing customers out of the conversation just when intent is highest. With Cashfree Here, and our collaboration with Mastercard and Swiggy, we are fundamentally changing that by making payments a native part of AI conversations. This is not just about faster checkouts, it is about enabling a completely new way for businesses to sell, engage, and grow in an AI-first world.”
Gautam Aggarwal, President, India & South Asia, Mastercard, said, “India is at the forefront of adopting new digital payment experiences, and as commerce moves into conversational and AI driven environments, the foundation of trust must remain unwavering. At Mastercard, trust is built into everything we design. This collaboration will bring passkey enabled biometric authentication to card payments within AI native applications, ensuring consumers can transact with confidence even as experiences become more seamless and intuitive. This association marks an important step in shaping the next era of India’s digital commerce.”
Madhusudhan Rao, Chief Technology Officer, Swiggy said, “At Swiggy, convenience has always been at the heart of how we build. As we embed conversational AI across our offerings, we are reimagining how consumers discover, decide, and order across food delivery, quick commerce, and dining out, with payments to follow. As AI driven interfaces become more central to everyday commerce, it is essential that both ordering and payments remain intuitive and frictionless across these emerging touchpoints. Innovations like Cashfree Here strengthen this infrastructure, enabling more contextual, secure, and seamless commerce as the ecosystem evolves.”
As conversational AI adoption accelerates, a growing gap has become evident across the ecosystem. While AI apps excel at discovery, recommendations, and personalisation, payments often sit outside the chat experience, breaking context and causing drop-offs at the most critical point of the journey. Customers are pushed to external pages and multiple steps, while developers face significant complexity around security, compliance, and integration when attempting to support payments within AI environments. Without a purpose-built payment layer, conversational commerce risks remaining a promising front-end without the ability to close transactions.
Cashfree Here addresses this gap by acting as a native payments layer for AI apps built on platforms such as OpenAI’s Apps SDK and Anthropic’s MCP framework. It enables businesses to embed UPI, and card payments directly within the chat interface, allowing users to complete purchases without leaving the conversation. Card payments are secured using passkey-based biometric authentication supported by Mastercard, enabling a faster and more secure alternative to traditional OTP flows. Powered by Cashfree’s payments infrastructure, the solution ensures secure payment experiences while significantly reducing integration effort, making it easier for businesses to move from AI-led discovery to real-time conversion.
More than just enabling in-chat payments, Cashfree Here lays the foundation for the next generation of AI-native commerce. Transactions are completed through secure, user-driven flows, with confirmations surfaced instantly within the conversation, preserving trust and clarity for customers. For businesses, this means higher conversions, lower drop-offs, and the ability to monetise AI interactions at scale, while for customers it delivers a seamless, intuitive, and secure shopping experience inside AI conversations. With Cashfree Here, Cashfree Payments is extending its role from a payments provider to a core enabler of how commerce will be built and experienced inside AI-driven applications.
About Cashfree Payments: Cashfree Payments is a leader in payments in India. Founded in 2015, Cashfree Payments processes transactions worth $80B annually for more than a million businesses.
Businesses use Cashfree Payments to collect payments from 100+ payment methods, make payouts, make cross border payments, improve conversions with a one-click checkout, recover abandoned carts, and predict and reduce returns. With an easy onboarding and integration process, and compatibility with popular merchant platforms like Shopify, Wix, WordPress, WooCommerce, WhatsApp, Cashfree Payments enables businesses to start transactions within a day. Cashfree Payments directly connects with all payment networks and owns its payment processing technology end-to-end, ensuring higher success rates and reliability. Built for scale, it enables businesses to process an industry-leading 12,000 transactions per second, handling peak demand effortlessly.
Alongside payments, Cashfree Payments offers SecureID, an identity verification stack with a comprehensive suite of APIs and KYC components. SecureID enables fintechs and startups to streamline compliant onboarding and KYC flows by minimising user inputs, thus reducing drop-offs, intelligently verifying identity documents, and detecting fraud and anomalies with high accuracy.
Cashfree Payments is authorised by the Reserve Bank of India to operate as a payment aggregator for both domestic and cross-border payments, and was one of the first entities to be authorised. It is also authorised to issue Prepaid Instruments. Cashfree Payments is backed by Silicon Valley investor Y Combinator, Apis Partners, State Bank of India (SBI), KRAFTON, and was incubated by PayPal.
Media contact: Harshit Pai | harshit.pai@cashfree.com | 7411082766
