70% fraud detection, 10-min go-lives: Inside Cashfree’s AI-driven payments core with Ramkumar Venkatesan & Mayank Juneja

As India’s digital economy matures from simple online transactions to AI-driven commerce, Cashfree Payments is evolving far beyond its origins as a payment gateway company. What started a decade ago as a payouts platform has steadily transformed into what Ramkumar Venkatesan, CTO, Cashfree Payments, describes as a “fintech operating system”, a technology layer designed to handle everything from payments and identity verification to fraud detection, compliance, and increasingly, AI-powered automation.

“The first product that Cashfree started with was payouts, money going out,” says Venkatesan. “Very soon after that, we got into the payment gateway business as well. Since then, we’ve expanded into adjacent areas like SecureID and Shield, which are closely related to payments and trust.”

That expansion mirrors a broader shift happening across fintech globally. Payments are no longer just about moving money between accounts, rather they are becoming intelligent infrastructure layers capable of managing identity, security, compliance, and autonomous decision-making.

For Cashfree, this transformation is tightly linked to India’s rapidly evolving digital ecosystem. The company now operates across domestic and cross-border payments, fraud prevention, prepaid instruments, wallets, and merchant verification. Venkatesan says the company’s vision is straightforward. “Anything that a growing business needs to do with money and transactions, it should be able to rely on Cashfree to make that happen,” he adds.

But the company’s next phase may be even more ambitious. Cashfree is preparing for a world where AI agents themselves become active participants in commerce. “If an AI agent is buying breakfast for you, you don’t want it to suddenly order food for ten people,” Venkatesan says. “So we enable payments to be capped, secured, and governed. That becomes critical in an AI-first world.”

Engineering for scale and reliability

Running financial infrastructure in India means operating at extraordinary scale. Payment spikes during festivals, sales events, and quick-commerce surges require systems that can process massive transaction volumes with near-zero downtime.

For Mayank Juneja, Architect, Cashfree Payments, resilience begins with designing for failure. “You start by assuming that things can go wrong,” Juneja explains. “Bad code can go into production. Infrastructure providers can face outages. Entire cloud regions can go down. Merchants still expect us to be available all the time.”

To address this, the spokespeople shared that Cashfree has built layered testing systems, progressive deployments, redundancy mechanisms, and multi-region cloud architecture. The company has also invested heavily in disaster recovery and infrastructure resilience.

“We use AWS as our primary region, but we also prepare for scenarios where even a region can go down,” says Juneja. “That requires significant architectural investment.”

This focus on reliability is increasingly important as digital payments become deeply embedded into everyday business operations. For merchants, even a brief payment disruption can create cascading operational failures.

Open source and the AI acceleration

Cashfree’s technology stack is deeply influenced by open-source software, something both executives believe has become even more important in the AI era.

“Open source levels the playing field,” says Venkatesan. “It keeps us vendor-neutral and allows innovation to move much faster.”

According to Juneja, AI has dramatically accelerated open-source adoption. “Earlier, reaching 10,000 GitHub stars could take years, but now AI projects are getting there in weeks,” he says.

At the same time, the leadership acknowledges that open-source systems also introduce security challenges because vulnerabilities are publicly visible. Yet Venkatesan argues that transparency ultimately improves resilience. “The advantage is that fixes happen rapidly because so many people are looking at the system,” he says. “Over time, widely adopted open-source software can become more secure than proprietary systems.”

AI moves from buzzword to business impact

While generative AI became a mainstream enterprise priority only recently, Cashfree had already been using AI in areas such as fraud detection and risk analysis for years. What has changed now is the scale of adoption across the company.

Juneja describes three major layers of AI integration at Cashfree. The first is internal productivity, using AI to accelerate software development and improve engineering efficiency. The second is embedding AI directly into products such as video KYC, multilingual verification, and fraud detection systems. The third is transforming Cashfree into what he calls an “AI-first company.”

The impact has been tangible. Merchant integrations that once took hours or days can now be completed in minutes. “Today, merchants can integrate and go live within ten minutes,” says Juneja.

Customer support has also been heavily automated. According to the company, nearly 70% of support tickets are now resolved autonomously by AI agents operating round the clock. “A startup founder launching on a Saturday night can integrate payments and resolve issues instantly through AI,” says Venkatesan.

AI is also playing a major role in fraud prevention. The company says nearly 70% of risky transactions are now identified through AI-driven systems. Yet Cashfree still maintains human oversight in critical cases. “There is always a confidence score,” Juneja explains. “Depending on thresholds and transaction value, the system can either block the transaction automatically or defer it to a human.”

Blockchain beyond cryptocurrency

Unlike many global fintech conversations that focus heavily on cryptocurrencies, Cashfree sees blockchain primarily through a practical infrastructure lens.

Venkatesan believes India’s cautious regulatory approach toward decentralised cryptocurrencies is understandable. Instead, he sees stronger use cases emerging in regulated environments such as subsidy tracking and cross-border settlements. “If you could fully track how subsidy money is used and where it finally ends up, you could significantly reduce leakage,” he says.

Cross-border payments remain another major opportunity. While domestic UPI transactions settle instantly, international transfers still involve intermediaries, compliance checks, and long settlement cycles. Juneja believes blockchain-backed systems and stablecoins could eventually reduce both settlement times and transaction costs, especially for global business payments.

The rise of developer-led fintech

One of the biggest shifts in modern fintech is the growing influence of developers in purchasing and platform decisions. APIs, documentation quality, SDKs, and developer experience increasingly determine which platforms merchants adopt. “We have always been an API-first company,” says Juneja. “Whether it’s a large enterprise or a small business owner, the underlying layer is still APIs.”

Cashfree is now extending that philosophy into the AI era through MCP (Model Context Protocol) layers and AI-enabled developer tools. “We are moving from being API-first to AI-first,” says Venkatesan. “Our APIs are now exposed through MCP layers so AI agents can interact with them naturally.”

The company’s AI tools can already analyse logs, diagnose integration failures, suggest fixes, and even raise support requests automatically. “It’s not just about helping developers integrate faster,” Juneja says. “It’s also about helping them react to operational issues in real time.”

Regulation as an innovation driver

As India moves toward stronger digital privacy and governance frameworks through the DPDP Act, Cashfree sees regulation less as a hurdle and more as a business opportunity. “Regulation is needed,” says Venkatesan. “Otherwise it becomes the Wild West.”

The company has already built internal consent management systems designed to help merchants operationalise DPDP compliance and manage customer permissions more efficiently.

At the same time, both executives acknowledge that India still faces major awareness gaps around digital identity and consent. Yet they remain optimistic about the country’s trajectory. “No other country has built digital identity infrastructure at India’s scale,” Venkatesan says, referring to India’s broader digital public infrastructure ecosystem.

That belief in India’s digital future also shapes Cashfree’s next major launch: agentic workflows that allow merchants to automate operational processes using AI directly on the company’s infrastructure. “We are opening up our systems in a secure way,” says Venkatesan. “Merchants will be able to automate workflows using AI and our payment events and data.”

In many ways, that may define the next chapter not just for Cashfree, but for fintech itself, moving from enabling digital payments to becoming the infrastructure layer powering autonomous commerce.