NewsVoir
Bengaluru (Karnataka) [India], October 31: Grain, gold, paper, plastic. For most of history, money has been getting lighter, and in India it eventually became a sound: the little voice on a shopkeeper’s speaker telling you fifty rupees just arrived. UPI now handles close to a billion transactions a day, and paying someone feels like nothing at all. But someone is building it, running it and paying for it. So who are they, how does their business work, and what are they up to next?
In the latest episode of WTF is Payments, Nikhil Kamath dissects all this and more. One table and three core pillars of India's digital payments architecture: Sohini Rajola, Executive Director, Growth at NPCI, the organisation behind UPI; Harshil Mathur, Co-founder and CEO of Razorpay, the payment aggregator and merchant interface; and Sameer Nigam, Founder and CEO of PhonePe, the payment app and consumer front-end. Across a deep conversation, they move from how a single UPI transfer actually works to the economics of free payments, the weight of regulation and the opportunities still open to founders.
Mathur recounts how he wanted to collect money online for a side project and kept being told to just take cash. “It didn’t make sense to me that something digital is harder to do than something physical,” he says. Nigam was at Flipkart for the first Big Billion Day, when around 10 million card payments were attempted in eight hours and about 9 million failed, some of them after the money had already left customers’ accounts. UPI fixed much of that for the person paying, and Nigam says it was built far more quietly than people assume, by maybe 20 people. Underneath every seamless and seemingly invisible transfer process, though, sit roughly ten API calls, real-time fraud checks and settlements between banks that NPCI runs ten times a day.
The sharpest exchange of the episode comes, unsurprisingly, over market share caps. PhonePe and Google Pay together account for around 80% of UPI transaction volume, which brings the discussion to NPCI’s 30% volume cap on third-party UPI apps and the thinking behind it. At the heart of it is a balance between consumer choice and a healthy, competitive ecosystem: should an app be told to stop growing because customers keep choosing it? Nigam makes the case for letting the market decide, while Mathur and Rajola speak to the value of a broad base of players and the long-term health of the system.
Kamath has been on the other side of the regulatory cap argument. Zerodha once hit a regulatory cap and watched clients move to smaller brokers, and while he didn’t like it at the time, he thinks it may have been good for the ecosystem in the long run.
The other big debate is over AI agents, and it splits the room. Nigam isn’t convinced the economics work yet, while Mathur thinks the cost of running AI models will keep falling. Mathur sees a very Indian opening in agents that speak a user’s own language, for the millions who still book travel and buy insurance through a local agent because apps don’t speak theirs. NPCI, meanwhile, is working on how agent-led payments can run on UPI and stay interoperable across every app.
The data produces some of the conversation’s most surprising moments. Tier 2 towns and beyond have consistently made up 65 to 70% of digital money movement, much of it moving from one village to another, while online shopping is still driven by a fairly small group of people. Nigam also shares what PhonePe saw after the recent GST changes: where GST fell by 2%, spending rose 5.5 to 6%, where it fell by 5%, spending jumped 13%, and where rates stayed the same, it barely moved.
From there the conversation turns to the founders building what comes after scan and pay. PayGlocal Co-founder and CTO Yogesh Lokhande explain why cross-border card payments so often fail, with different banks reading the same transaction in different ways, while his Co-founder and CEO Prachi Dharani points out that Indian brands are going global without an Indian payments company big enough to take them there.
Dodo Payments co-founder and CPTO Ayush Agarwal describes how a merchant of record lets a developer in Indore sell a USD 20 subscription to someone in Berlin without building an international payments setup. He also reveals that almost all of Dodo’s code is now written by AI.
Seven founder and CEO Vijay Khubchandani, whose 7 Ring was built with RuPay, doesn’t think the QR code is the last word. As soundboxes and phones start accepting tap to pay, he expects NFC touchpoints to grow from around 1 crore to 4 or 5 crore, and payments to become “invisible over time”.
The conversation closes on what to build. Not another payments app, it turns out, but tools for the small retailer juggling 70 to 80 distributors and matching invoices, GST and TDS by hand, an easier way to tip in a UPI world, escrow-style payments for first-time online shoppers, cross-border payments for medical travellers, and formal credit for people whose payment history finally exists. The advice to founders is just as grounded. Dharani says too many young founders look for the grey in regulation instead of its spirit, and that compliance cannot be an afterthought. Lokhande puts it more simply: payments is a business of trust.
The episode is available now on YouTube.
About People by WTF
People by WTF is a global podcast platform hosted by Nikhil Kamath, featuring in-depth conversations with leaders across business, policy, technology, culture and academia. The show explores long-term institutional, technological and economic questions shaping global society through candid, high-signal dialogue.
Past guests include Elon Musk, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Bill Gates, Ajay Banga, Martin Escobari, Rishi Sunak, Akshata Murty and Ranbir Kapoor.
Notes to the Editor
Guest Information
- Sohini Rajola: Executive Director, Growth at NPCI, the organisation behind UPI. NPCI was set up by the RBI and the Indian Banks' Association as a not-for-profit, with initial funding of Rs 100 crore from ten banks. Before NPCI, Rajola spent around 18 years at Axis Bank working across payments, digital and new initiatives, and then worked at Western Union in cross-border money transfer.
- Harshil Mathur: Co-founder and CEO of Razorpay, which he started with Shashank Kumar. Mathur's struggle to accept online payments for a side project helped spark the company. Razorpay serves businesses across payments, cross-border collections, connected banking, payroll and vendor payments.
- Sameer Nigam: Founder and CEO of PhonePe, which he co-founded with Rahul Chari. Before PhonePe, Nigam founded a digital music company, Mime360, which Flipkart acquired in 2011, and went on to lead checkout and payments at Flipkart, including during the first Big Billion Day sale.
- Prachi Dharani and Yogesh Lokhande: Co-founder and CEO, and Co-founder and CTO, of PayGlocal, a cross-border payments company. PayGlocal helps Indian merchants, exporters and freelancers get paid by customers abroad, and helps global merchants accept UPI and local payment methods from Indian consumers.
- Ayush Agarwal: Co-founder and CPTO of Dodo Payments, a merchant of record platform that helps digital businesses sell globally by handling payments, taxes and invoicing across countries.
- Vijay Khubchandani: Founder and CEO of Seven, which launched India's first payment wearable, the 7 Ring, an NFC payment ring built in collaboration with RuPay.
Key Themes Discussed
- How a UPI transaction works, who's involved and what each step costs
- The economics of UPI and why it's hard to build a payments business that lasts
- Market share caps, competition, consumer choice and public accountability
- Digital payments in Tier 2 and smaller towns, and how that compares with online shopping
- What payments data shows about spending, including the impact of GST cuts
- Cross-border payments, payment orchestration and merchant of record models
- Wearables, NFC and tap to pay as possible next steps after QR codes
- AI agents and what agent-led payments on UPI could look like
- Opportunities for founders in B2B payments, tipping, escrow, medical travel and access to credit
- Why compliance, consumer protection and trust need to be built in from the start
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