Intelligent commerce and merchant payments: GFF 2026 panel

For a decade, the task in India's merchant payments was to get every shop and website to accept digital money. The value, leaders argued, at GFF 2026, is now moving to identity, risk, credit and growth, and to preparing the checkout for AI agents that may soon shop on consumers' behalf.

For most of the past decade, the central question in India's merchant payments was one of reach. How could India's billions of consumers, cutting across geography, culture, and access, be brought into the fold of digital payments? The underlying question was that of adoption at scale. Card terminals, QR codes and, above all, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) answered that question at a scale few markets have matched.

The industry now faces a different question: what can a payment do beyond moving money? It might help a merchant recognise a customer, stop a fraudster, extend credit or win back a lapsed buyer. In other words, the payment is thus becoming an integrated, and a more connected layer of intelligence and action, helping merchants understand what is happening around a transaction and respond to it. Increasingly, that transaction may also involve a customer who is not a person at all, but software acting on someone's behalf. For India, which built its payment rails faster than almost any other country, the implication is significant. The next phase will be decided not by who can process a payment, but by who can make that payment useful.

That was the ground covered by a panel titled 'Reimagining merchant payments: From acceptance to intelligent commerce infrastructure' at the seventh edition of the Global Fintech Fest (GFF) in Mumbai. Moderated by Pratik Bhakta of The Economic Times, it brought together four panellists: Amir Valliani, VP and General Manager at PayPal; Anuj Khosla, CEO of Hitachi Payment Services; Sudhir Sehgal, Chief Operating Officer, Online Business, at Paytm Payments Services; and Gary Yang, President, APAC, at Adyen.

Each panellist approached that shift from a different vantage point. For Gary Yang, President, APAC, at Adyen, the core business of processing payments still has room to create value. He brought a global view of how consumers' preferred ways of paying differ across markets, and how offering the right options can make the checkout experience more seamless, reduce drop-offs and help merchants convert more customers. Amir Valliani, VP and General Manager at PayPal, looked at the shift from the merchant's perspective: businesses increasingly want their payments partner to manage the complexity of different countries so they can focus on their customers. That shift also changes where payments sit inside a business, with the conversation moving beyond finance teams towards marketing and customer engagement. Sudhir Sehgal, Chief Operating Officer, Online Business, at Paytm Payments Services, spoke from India's consumer frontline, where passkeys and biometrics are removing friction, while agentic commerce raises a new question: will consumers trust a machine with their money? Anuj Khosla, CEO of Hitachi Payment Services, focused on the physical merchant, whose card terminal is turning into an Android-based business platform, and for whom embedded finance is becoming the test of loyalty.

The missing method and a transaction missedYang framed the challenge through the eyes of a merchant expanding into a new country. Consumers' preferred payment methods keep diverging across markets: UPI in India, digital wallets and buy-now-pay-later services elsewhere. When a merchant does not offer the payment method a customer wants, the missing option can mean a lost sale.

A merchant entering a new market therefore has to support the payment methods customers already use, or risk losing the transaction altogether.

"Up to

50% of consumers, based on our research, will refuse to buy a product if their desired payment method is not available," Yang said. "A retail business wanting to go live in India without UPI, you're not going to make much progress."

Valliani saw merchants responding by asking their providers to take care of those differences for them. Instead of navigating each country's payment methods, regulations and fraud risks separately, merchants want a payments partner that can manage that complexity while they focus on their customers. "They [merchants] are much more looking for us to manage customers and not countries for them," he said. "They want to think about their customer, but they [merchants] want to be abstracted away from the complexity of regulation, of fraud, of risk, of local payment methods."

Khosla described the domestic version of the same impulse. Merchants, he said, want to give customers a choice of channel "because they don't want their customers to really worry about the payment part of the process." He explained that merchants want to see all their sales together in one place, whatever payment method the customer uses: cash, card or UPI, and "what the daily collection is, be it cash or digital", as they "want to get the full picture". "India is probably the only country where even a cash transaction can be registered on a point of sale," he added.

When the buyer is a machineThe most consequential change on the horizon, the panellists broadly agreed, is agentic commerce. In agentic commerce, AI systems go beyond helping consumers search and complete purchases for them. Valliani said it "has the chance to be the biggest change since mobile from a payments perspective." He noted, however, the gap between what AI can do today and what it will need to do. "Today, you can do AI-led discovery, but you can't do a lot of AI-led purchasing," he said. "You have to figure out how to connect identity, payments, risk, and then merchant-side inventory, which is serviced in very different ways."

Yang broke down the problem into three parts: merchants' product listings must be readable by agents; taxes, shipping and discounts must be handled consistently at checkout; and the payment itself must go through. He was candid about where things stand. "It's super early days," he said. Transaction volumes remain minimal, he noted, even though about 70% of people already use AI to research purchases.

In India, Sehgal pointed out, some of the groundwork is already visible. On Paytm's travel app, a user can ask for the cheapest ticket on a given date and complete the booking end to end. "What is new in India is passkeys and biometrics," he said. "It is making the entire transaction much more frictionless." Consumers are no longer waiting for one-time passwords.

The harder question, Sehgal argued, is trust, and he put it to the audience. He asked how many people in the hall used ChatGPT, and then how many trusted it. Only three hands went up for the second question. "The question of trust now becomes even more critical," he said. Authentication has already moved from the card to the device, he explained, and it is now moving to the agent. Merchants will have to accept transaction instructions from software acting for a consumer. "What we are witnessing today will require far heavier plumbing to be done, infrastructure to be created, rules to be created."

Fraud at machine speedThe same technology is reshaping risk. Valliani said AI had accelerated both sides of the equation. "You can now synthetically create fake identities at a rapid pace, and the cost of testing them out has gone way down," he said. Defenders, however, have scale and data on their side. He described a PayPal feature that warns users before they send a peer-to-peer payment if signals on the receiving side point to a scam.

Yang made a similar case. "Old-school static ID checks are not really the best way to identify fraud anymore," he said. Behaviour can flag fraud more reliably than a fixed check. He gave the example of a card used in Sweden and then, half an hour later, at a store on the other side of the world.

Sehgal noted that transactions on Paytm range from ₹2 to ₹2 lakh, which generates a vast layer of data. "The layer of AI is helping us to identify the trends early on and protect our merchants and customers upfront," he said.

The terminal becomes a platformThe physical merchant is changing just as quickly. Khosla once deployed Linux-based terminals for a bank. He said the move to Android had transformed what a terminal can do, much as smartphones transformed the phone. "Earlier, there used to be only one app on the device," he said. "Now there are, on average, four to five different apps available on these devices that we deploy." These apps cover EMI offers, loyalty programmes, customer feedback, inventory management and connections to the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC).

Embedded finance, Khosla argued, is becoming the anchor of the merchant relationship. Merchants want pre-approved business loans and supply-chain finance. Such offerings "really drive a lot of loyalty towards the acquirer or the partner who's giving payments as a service."

Yang approached loyalty from the retailer's perspective. Many retailers keep online and in-store sales in separate systems, making it difficult to recognise returning customers at the till. Adyen's Unified Commerce solution connects payment data across these channels, helping retailers build a more complete picture of their customers and create more consistent shopping experiences. A payment instrument, Yang explained, can help bridge the gap between online and in-store transactions, allowing retailers to recognise returning customers and strengthen loyalty. Sehgal described Paytm enabling merchants to connect their data to AI assistants such as ChatGPT or Claude for analysis that goes beyond standard dashboards.

Commodity or value?That expansion raises an uncomfortable question for the industry: if payments are becoming a platform, who pays for the platform? Valliani was direct. "A lot of what historically payments companies used to do is being commoditised," he said.

When he started in his role, he said, most of his conversations were with finance teams managing payment costs. Increasingly, they are with marketing teams asking how payments can help acquire customers. Where payments sit inside a company still shapes the discussion. An airline, he said, might push back: "I don't control revenue lines; I control the cost line. You're going to charge me five basis points for that; I'm not sure that I want this." Digital goods and gaming companies, by contrast, tend to care more about bringing people onto their platforms.

Yang partly disagreed. "We still think that payments are not commoditised," he said. Small optimisations in how transactions are processed can raise the share of payments that succeed, he argued, and that translates directly into revenue.

In India, the price question is sharper, the domestic panellists acknowledged. Indian merchants constantly question value, and intense competition means that any new value can quickly become a commodity itself. That pressure, they suggested, is also part of why India has led in digital payments: it forces providers to demonstrate value rather than assume it.

The next test for IndiaIn his closing summary, Bhakta noted that the haggling between merchants and providers will continue. It is also, he said, what pushes the industry towards innovations priced to sustain and expand merchants' businesses.

For India, the discussion points to a second phase of digital payments that may prove harder than the first. The first phase was about building rails and bringing merchants onto them, driven by public infrastructure, regulation and scale. The second rests on things that are harder to mandate: trust in automated transactions, fraud defences that keep pace with AI, credit and loyalty services that merchants value enough to pay for, and common rules under which agents can transact.

The panellists suggested that no single company could build all of this alone. Instead, they urged a collective consensus that payment is no longer simply where a sale ends. In India's next phase of digital commerce, it is increasingly where the relationship between merchant and customer is built.

(This article is generated and published by ET Spotlight team. You can get in touch with them on etspotlight@timesinternet.in)