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The advent of the United Payments Interface led to a sudden boom in digital payments across India. National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) data reveals that the average daily volume of UPI transactions in 2024 was between 400 and 545 million, as compared to between 81 and 462 million in 2021. 

Sandeep Indurkar, CEO, Resilient Payments, a BharatPe company, explored this uptick and the disruptions in the digital payments space with YourStory Media’s Rishabh Mansur in a fireside chat at TechSparks 2024. Indurkar said UPI had democratised payments and that a collaborative approach would be the driving force behind payments across India.

Culling insights gained from his 17-year career, Indurkar said, “If you are able to solve payments, it will solve a lot of your problems. When you are trying to solve a payment problem, you need to see what dependency you have, like with the bank.”

He cited the example of BharatPe, which created a QR code and partnered with four banks. In case the QR code of any single bank was down or not working, the merchant using the service would discard the QR code, and bringing it back up was a challenge, he said. 

So, “if you are able to solve [the problem], have control and a partnership approach, and build a payment platform which will actually give the best SLA to the merchant, then it solves [the payment problem]”, he said, revealing his learning from his time at ICICI Bank.

When Indurkar joined BharatPe, the company built its payment stack with the help of Unity Small Finance Bank, in which it had a 49% stake, bringing dependencies in-house and reducing the dependency on external banks. 

On the secret of cracking deals and maintaining strong partner relationships, Indurkar said he hated the word sales and preferred to “meet people in person to understand what type of solution suits them”. He added that his success rate was 200%, unless there was a problem or a contractual obligation.

Citing the example of Swiggy as a client when he worked with ICICI Bank, Indurkar said the food delivery platform approached the bank looking for a solution to collect the money collected by delivery executives for COD orders. The bank designed a dynamic VPA so delivery executives would receive the money and credit it to Swiggy instantaneously. This solved the main problem faced by delivery executives: cash handling.

On emerging technologies set to disrupt the sector, Indurkar said AI and Machine Learning were a “big investment area” and both are used for early fraud detection at BharatPe. “For the underwriting you require a really robust fraud mechanism in place and there is no other way than AI and ML [through which] we are able to solve it,” he said. 

Indurkar spoke about the global expansion of UPI, stating that there is a big business opportunity if consumers are able to make global payments through their favourite payments app and do not need to download another app for making payments overseas when travelling. The use case remains for tourists or people visiting India. 

An integration with foreign payment systems would be required with regulatory understanding, but the problem can be solved if payments can be made through QR codes globally, Indurkar said.

Watch the video here: