Beyond the first transaction: Building inclusive digital payments for Bharat

For digital payments to work for Bharat, getting someone to make their first transaction is only the beginning. The bigger challenge is making sure they feel confident enough to return, whether they are shopping online in their preferred language, making a payment independently, or running a small business.

At TechSparks 2026, Sagar Kumar, Vice President of Engineering at PayU, joined Shivani Muthanna, Senior Director – Strategic Content & Video at YourStory, for a fireside chat on the engineering behind inclusive digital payments.

Balancing speed with reliability

Having worked at early-stage startups and on systems handling millions of transactions, Kumar explained how engineering priorities change as businesses scale.

In the early stages, startup teams focus on speed, launching products quickly and learning as they go. But architecture remains important. Loosely coupled systems make it easier to add new business verticals without rebuilding everything from scratch.

At scale, speed is still important, but there is less room for error. Feature flags, incremental rollouts and A/B testing allow teams to introduce changes gradually, test them with specific customer groups and limit the impact of potential problems.

“Speed is the constant. It's just that the room for error will be smaller when you grow to a larger scale ecosystem, and in that process, you have to build enough safety nets,” he said.

Building for the next 100 payments

With UPI now familiar to many users in smaller cities and towns, Kumar believes the next step is to make online payments as intuitive as offline transactions.

PayU’s checkout pages default to a scan-and-pay option, offering an experience similar to what customers are used to at physical stores. The company has also launched Checkout for Bharat, which allows users to view checkout pages in multiple languages, making it easier for those who are less comfortable with English to complete payments.

But a simpler interface is only part of the solution.

For a first-time online shopper, seeing money debited from their account followed by a payment failure message can quickly undermine confidence. Kumar explained that payment systems need safeguards such as idempotency checks, which ensure that repeating the same request does not change the outcome after the first successful attempt.

These checks help prevent duplicate debits. Clear communication about failed transactions and automatic reversals are also important so customers do not have to initiate refund requests themselves.

“The next level of inclusivity, in my opinion, is not to bring a first-time user online to make payments, but to gain the confidence so that he makes another 100 payments. We engineer our systems to achieve that kind of a goal,” Kumar said.

Making accessibility part of engineering

In August, PayU launched an RBI-compliant checkout page designed to help blind and visually impaired users make payments independently.

The features include screen-reader voiceovers that identify important information such as payment amounts, merchant details, and transaction status. The company also made changes to button sizes, text layouts, and other visual elements.

PayU tested the checkout experience with blind and visually impaired users, who were able to complete payments independently rather than rely on someone else.

The company has also made accessibility part of its software development lifecycle, treating it as a consideration alongside functionality and performance when developing new features.

Kumar pointed out that these improvements can benefit other users too. High-contrast displays, for example, make it easier for delivery partners to view payment pages in bright sunlight. Clearly labelled interface elements can also help AI agents navigate checkout pages.

Keeping transactions running at scale

PayU processes close to 20 million transactions on an average day. At that volume, even a 0.1% failure rate could mean 20,000 unsuccessful payments.

Kumar explained that the challenge of operating at this scale comes from the number of systems involved. A single transaction can depend on merchants, issuing and acquiring banks, payment networks, aggregators, and multiple gateways. A slowdown or disruption in any one of these systems can affect the payment.

PayU uses intelligent routing to manage this complexity. Its systems monitor gateway success rates across several parameters, while machine-learning (ML) models help determine the best route for each transaction.

The algorithms also send a portion of transaction traffic through alternative routes to test their performance. This gives the system a real-time view of how different gateways are functioning.

If a gateway's performance deteriorates, transactions can be redirected to another option. Kumar said PayU has patented this routing algorithm.

The aim is to manage these complexities in the background so merchants and customers can complete transactions without having to deal with them.

Turning payments into business opportunities

Kumar also discussed how payment data can create opportunities beyond transactions.

UPI payments generate transaction histories that can help businesses understand customer payment behavior and support financial underwriting for specific credit needs.

PayU’s LazyPay addresses buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) use cases, while its merchant lending product helps small and medium businesses manage cash-flow requirements, including purchasing goods at more favourable prices. Repayments can be collected through daily settlements.

The company has also launched Agent HQ, which helps small businesses automate operational tasks such as following up with customers who abandon their websites, reconciling payments and initiating refunds.

By reducing the time founders spend on these activities, such tools can allow them to focus on growing their businesses.

For Kumar, the benefits extend beyond individual merchants. As small businesses grow, the wider digital payments ecosystem stands to gain too.