After UPI, Indian payment players look to foreign shores

As Indian fintech companies contend with thin margins in the domestic payment market dominated by the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), executives Arif Khan, chief innovation officer at Razorpay; Harsh Gupta, chief revenue officer at Cashfree Payments; Sanjay Tripathy, cofounder and chief executive officer of BriskPe; and Rahul Jain, chief financial officer at NTT Data Payment Services, speak to Ajinkya Kawale at the Business Standard BFSI Insight Summit 2025 about how global expansion is becoming central to long-term growth strategies.

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Edited excerpts:Indian payment firms are increasingly looking overseas in the post-UPI era. What is driving this push, and what are the key challenges in scaling cross-border payments globally?

ARIF KHAN: In India, the payments ecosystem has evolved around extremely low pricing, largely because of UPI. Over time, we have become comfortable operating in an environment where margins are thin, and scale compensates for pricing. When Indian fintechs evaluate overseas markets, even slightly higher margins appear attractive compared to what is possible domestically, especially given the growing cost of compliance and innovation. At the same time, global expansion is not just about chasing better economics. Cross-border payments introduce layers of complexity that do not exist in a single-market system like UPI. Risk management, regulatory alignment, and settlement infrastructure vary significantly across regions, and that fundamentally changes how payment businesses have to be built and operated.