Senior Executive

Pine Labs appoints ex-amazon, Razorpay executive Jayaram Karthik as COO. Pine Labs has appointed Jayaram Karthik as its COO, with the veteran executive set to oversee operations and merchant experience across India and international markets. The appointment comes as Pine Labs looks to strengthen its operational infrastructure and standardise merchant journeys across its global footprint of more than 20 countries. Karthik brings more than 25 years of experience across operations, risk, analytics and technology, with leadership stints at American Express, Citibank, Amazon, Tata, and Razorpay. Fintech platform Pine Labs has appointed ex-Razorpay SVP Jayaram Karthik as its COO, as the company looks to strengthen its operational capabilities and support its next phase of growth. Karthik will lead operations and merchant experiences across India and Pine Labs' international markets. His mandate will include building technology-enabled operating models aimed at creating seamless, trusted and locally relevant experiences for merchants.

Unified Agent Protocol to power automated Small-Value UPI transactions by AI Agents. Last updated: September 1, 2026 11:27 pm By Rinky Rai - A freelance journalist NPCI Readies Unified Agent Protocol to Enable Small-Value UPI Payments Through AI Agents NEW DELHI: The National Payments Corporation of India is preparing a framework to allow artificial intelligence agents to carry out small-value transactions on the Unified Payments Interface without requiring manual approval for every payment. According to a Reuters report, the retail payments umbrella entity is likely to unveil the framework, named the Unified Agent Protocol, next week at the Global Fintech Fest 2026 in Mumbai. Under the current architecture, users must confirm transactions before payments are completed, but the proposed protocol will automate the process for routine and low-value digital transactions where prior authorization has been granted. Integration with Existing Architecture to Drive Delegation The proposed framework is expected to leverage existing UPI functionalities, notably UPI Circle and Reserve Pay. UPI Circle permits primary account holders to delegate payment authority to another individual, while Reserve Pay facilitates payments within predetermined limits and conditions. By utilizing these tools, AI agents will be able to execute financial transfers under precise rules defined by users. Transaction limits, advance user consent, conditional triggers, and stringent safeguards will form the core operational parameters of the system, eliminating repetitive manual authentication for routine digital payments. Fintech Sector Expands Work on Agentic Payment Systems The move comes after NPCI successfully piloted an agentic payment mechanism last year, demonstrating the ability of AI tools to interact with payment networks. Several domestic fintech firms, including Razorpay, Pine Labs, and Cashfree, have also been building tools to support automated agent transactions. These technical advancements reflect a broader transition within the payments landscape, where artificial intelligence systems are shifting from serving as informational assistants to independently initiating and closing financial transactions within authorized parameters. Stringent Controls and Risk Mitigation Remain Central While agentic payments promise greater speed for low-value transfers, automated delegation also raises critical operational and security risks. Granting automated software the authority to execute transactions introduces potential challenges regarding incorrect instructions, fraudulent attempts, unauthorized transfers, and system errors. To mitigate these risks, the upcoming framework will rely heavily on explicit user permissions, automated transaction monitoring, active fraud detection algorithms, and dedicated mechanisms to halt or reverse suspicious payments. The precise transaction ceilings, operating guidelines, and security requirements will be established once NPCI formally publishes the implementation details of the protocol.

PaySprint launches SprintPGx: India's most intelligent multi-gateway payment platform. New Delhi: PaySprint Private Limited, one of India's fastest-growing B2B Banking FinTech and RegTech infrastructure companies, today announced the launch of SprintPGx, an intelligent Multi-PG (Multi Payment Gateway) platform purpose-built for Indian enterprises. SprintPGx eliminates one of the most persistent and costly pain points in digital commerce: payment failures. By connecting businesses to 10+ payment gateways simultaneously through a single integration and using artificial intelligence to route every transaction in real time, SprintPGx delivers higher conversion, lower cost, and near-zero downtime without any change to the customer checkout experience. The Silent Revenue Drain Facing Indian Enterprises On average, 2 to 5% of all online payment attempts in India fail, a figure that may seem small until the scale is applied. For an enterprise processing ₹100 crore in monthly transaction volume, that translates to ₹2 to 5 crore in lost revenue every single month from payments that simply did not go through. These failures stem from a single structural vulnerability: dependence on one payment gateway. When that gateway experiences downtime, high traffic, or approval rate dips for a specific card type or bank, businesses are left powerless. SprintPGx was built to permanently solve this problem. How SprintPGx Works SprintPGx functions as an invisible intelligence layer between a merchant's checkout page and multiple payment gateways. When a customer initiates a payment, SprintPGx receives the transaction in under 100 milliseconds, analyzes the card type, issuing bank, transaction amount, time of day, and historical success rates, and routes the payment to the gateway most likely to approve it, all before the customer notices anything. If the selected gateway fails or times out, SprintPGx automatically switches to the next best option in milliseconds. The platform supports three core routing strategies: Success Rate Routing (routes to the gateway with the highest historical approval rate for that card-bank combination), Cost-Based Routing (directs transactions to the cheapest available gateway, reducing MDR costs by up to 20 basis points), and Load Balancing (distributes payment load across gateways during peak traffic periods such as festive sales or IPL ticketing). SprintPGX Key Highlights What sets SprintPGx apart from every other multi gateway solution in the market is how those routing rules are created. Merchants do not need to write code, build a separate integration or manually configure logic to change how their transactions are routed. They simply tell PIX, PaySprint's in built AI agent, what they want in plain conversational language, and the rules are applied. A merchant can state that all high value transactions on a particular bank's cards should go to the gateway with the best approval rate, or that traffic should shift to the lowest cost provider after a certain hour, and PIX configures it instantly. This makes SprintPGx the only platform of its kind in India where payment routing can be managed entirely through natural language, without engineering support or vendor intervention. Performance That Speaks for Itself A Complete Payment Operations Platform Beyond intelligent routing, SprintPGx is a full-stack payment operations platform. Its Unified Dashboard consolidates all transactions, settlements, refunds, and reports from every connected gateway into a single real-time view, ending the operational burden of logging into multiple portals. Automated Reconciliation reduces reconciliation overhead by up to 3x for finance teams. The platform's PCI-DSS-compliant, enables seamless recurring payments and card-on-file transactions for subscriptions and EMI-based businesses. SprintPGx is integrated with 10+ payment gateways including Razorpay, PayU, Cashfree, Phonepe, and Paytm PG and can handle 10,000+ transactions per second, making it purpose-built for India's highest-volume enterprises. Developer-friendly SDKs for Node.js, Python, PHP, Java, and Go, alongside native mobile SDKs and pre-built plugins for Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento, allow most merchants to go live in hours. Security & Compliance at the Core SprintPGx is certified under ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type II, and PCI DSS, the most comprehensive compliance stack available in the Indian payments market. The platform employs AES-256 encryption for data at rest, TLS 1.3 for data in transit, Zero-Trust architecture, multi-factor authentication, and 24/7 real-time monitoring. Regular VAPT testing and annual third-party security audits ensure the platform continues to meet the rigorous standards of regulated industries. "At PaySprint, we built SprintPGx because we saw a problem that was quietly costing Indian enterprises crores every month. A single payment gateway is no longer enough for businesses operating at scale. SprintPGx is not just a routing tool; it is the payment intelligence layer that Indian enterprises have needed. We are giving businesses the same kind of infrastructure that was previously only available to the largest global players, and we are delivering it with a compliance stack, a dedicated implementation team, and India-first thinking baked into every feature." S. Anand, Founder & CEO, PaySprint Who SprintPGx Is Built For SprintPGx is purpose-designed for e-commerce and D2C brands with high-volume transaction peaks, fintech and lending platforms requiring compliance and recurring payment support, healthcare and insurance providers with sensitive billing requirements, EdTech and subscription businesses dependent on card-on-file transactions, event ticketing and travel platforms that cannot afford checkout failures during demand spikes, and enterprise retail chains requiring unified reconciliation across multiple locations.