The next problem to solve: When money arrives, what can merchants do in the meantime?

A payment that settles days after it clears can leave a small business owner unable to pay staff, while one that fails at checkout wastes the cost of acquiring the customer. Merchant payments are therefore evolving from a checkout function into financial infrastructure that shapes a business’s working capital, operations and, increasingly, its use of artificial intelligence (AI). Seen through this lens, a payments system should not only be evaluated by whether it accepts a transaction, but by how quickly and reliably it turns that transaction into usable money. For India, which built one of the world’s largest real-time payment systems in UPI, speed of payment must now be matched by speed of settlement, and domestic scale by global reach.

To answer the harder question of when the money actually arrives, and what the business can do in the meantime, Ritesh Agarwal, Founder and Group CEO of PRISM, the parent of OYO, and Roelant Prins, Chief Commercial Officer at Adyen, sat down with Abhinav Bansal, MD and Partner at Boston Consulting Group, at the seventh edition of the Global Fintech Fest (GFF) in Mumbai earlier this month.

Agarwal approached the subject as a merchant. His hospitality business spans some 35 countries, with most revenue from the US and Europe but managed by teams in India. For him, payments are a question of cash flow, acceptance rates and agility, and AI is already reshaping the back office. Prins spoke from the provider’s side, describing a roadmap set by large enterprise customers, the role of banking licences in easing cash flow, and a deliberately measured view of agentic commerce. Their perspectives helped demystify the Indian digital finance landscape in which the next gains lie less in getting merchants to accept digital payments than in what happens after the money moves.

When settlement is survival

Agarwal said the problem became clear through his hotel owners. “My hotel owner says, I just received a credit card payment of 100 rupees, and the expense is due tomorrow, on Saturday. I’m not going to get this cash in my bank account until Tuesday next week. That’s no fun,” he said. Some operators refused digital payments unless settlement was faster. “That’s when I realised that it’s time we solve this problem rather than leave it to itself.”

For such owners, Bansal observed, early settlement “is not about a feature. It’s literally about him or her being able to make payments to their own staff on time.”

Prins argued that technology alone could not fix this. Optimising payment processing, he said, “doesn’t automatically solve the need for cash flow.” What changes the equation is combining technology with a banking licence, which allows a provider to prefund slower payment methods so that business owners can access their money sooner. “Bringing them together is, from my point of view, where a lot of the fun starts,” he said.

Agarwal added a second priority: making sure the payment succeeds at all. Whether a guest pays by card in Germany, with a Discover card in the US, or through buy now, pay later for a ski holiday in Austria, the acceptance rate is a metric he and his management team track constantly. “You have acquired the customer. You don’t want the transaction to fail just because you did not have a reliable path,” he said.

Who sets the payments agenda?

Where payments sit inside a company shapes what it gets out of them. Agarwal said many three- and four-star hotels run separate systems for property management, channel management, pricing and card acceptance that “don’t talk to each other”, which is why a single stack helps.

The question is increasingly not only how payments work, but who inside a company is responsible for making them work better.

Prins said the companies that benefit most are those that are engineering-driven payments strategies. “We see a lot of companies where the treasury also runs payments. That is a much more old-school mindset. They are talking only about contract terms,” he said. Where technology and engineering set the agenda, he added, “that makes a huge difference.”

AI in the back office before the checkout

On AI, both were cautious about agentic commerce. “Agentic commerce, for us at least, has been very basic. Agentic productivity has been very robust,” Agarwal said. Accounts receivable, accounts payable, treasury and taxation are increasingly handled by agents. In engineering, he said, new versions are now produced almost entirely by machines, which he likened to a cottage industry moving into factories.

Prins’s view reflected Adyen’s emphasis on pragmatic innovation: insisting on the present and focusing on use cases where the technology can deliver tangible value today, rather than getting carried away with grand visions of the future. An agent booking a trip at a set price within a set window, he said, “feels a bit like a discussion over my fridge ordering a bottle of milk. That’s never happened.” The industry, he argued, should “stay close to the use cases that we can solve with the technology today.” He also flagged a merchant worry: that AI intermediaries could erode the customer loyalty businesses have built over years. “This disintermediation is a big problem,” he said, arguing for open solutions that work across different protocols.

Agarwal’s practical advice was structured data: unlike humans, agents are “relatively unemotional” when deciding, so merchants must give them data they can use.

Both described India as a two-way market. Prins said global brands had long asked for help entering India, while Indian companies wanted help reaching customers abroad. Agarwal said UPI is now appearing overseas as Indians travel to Southeast Asia and the Middle East, and in some cities outside India it accounts for a double-digit share of his company’s collections. Indian brands such as Royal Enfield and Nykaa, he added, are building meaningful revenue abroad.

The Adyen–OYO partnership offers another example of the demands this cross-border expansion places on payment infrastructure. Over roughly eight years, Adyen has consolidated OYO’s global payments across e-commerce, mobile and point-of-sale onto a single platform, replacing fragmented providers across the US, UK, Europe, Latin America and Asia-Pacific. Network Token Optimisation has helped improve authorisation rates, while least-cost routing has reduced processing costs. A unified omnichannel view has also helped streamline OYO’s global financial operations.

The next measure of progress

The experts suggested that India’s next payments challenge will be measured less by how many merchants accept digital payments than by what those payments do for merchants once they arrive. For a hotel owner, that means faster access to money; for a global business, reliable acceptance across markets; and increasingly, for both, technology that can turn payment data into action. As Indian payment methods and brands move overseas, infrastructure built for domestic scale will increasingly be tested on how well it works across borders.