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In conversation with Editor Ankur Sharma, The News Strike, S. Anand, Founder & CEO of PaySprint, said India’s next phase of fintech growth will be driven not by payments alone but by intelligent financial infrastructure built on top of UPI. Reflecting on PaySprint’s journey from its launch in 2020 to serving over 5,100 partners through more than 200 APIs across seven product verticals, Anand said the focus is on simplifying banking infrastructure so businesses can innovate faster. He believes embedded finance, AI-led risk and compliance, account aggregation, digital escrow, and inclusive credit infrastructure will define the next chapter of India’s fintech ecosystem by transforming payments into complete financial workflows.
1. Tell us about yourself and your journey with PaySprint.
I've spent a little over two decades in and around financial technology, long enough to have watched India go from cash counters and paper KYC to a country where a vegetable vendor accepts payments on a QR code without thinking twice about it. That shift is what pulled me in and never let go.
PaySprint was born out of a fairly simple frustration. Around 2020, I kept seeing the same pattern: brilliant fintech ideas stuck for months because the plumbing underneath banking connections, verification, payouts, reconciliation was either broken, slow, or built for an older era. Founders were spending their energy fighting infrastructure instead of building products. So we set out to become that infrastructure layer, the digital rails that let others move fast.
We started in December 2020, and in roughly five years we've grown into a platform powering over 5,100 partners through a library of more than 200 API solutions across seven core product verticals. But honestly, the number I'm proudest of isn't a number at all, it's the fact that a business anywhere in the country can now plug into banking-grade infrastructure in a matter of days, not quarters. That's the journey, really: taking complexity off other people's plates so they can go build.
2. After the success of UPI, what could define the next phase of India's fintech evolution and which innovations will have the biggest impact?
UPI solved the “movement of money” problem beautifully. It made payments instant, interoperable and, for most Indians, invisible, which is the highest compliment you can pay a piece of infrastructure. But payments were always the opening act, not the whole show.
The next phase, in my view, is about intelligence and context sitting on top of those rails. It's one thing to move money instantly; it's another to move the right money, to the right person, with the right compliance and credit context baked in, in real time. That means the action moves to layers like account aggregation, embedded lending, digital escrow, and verification-as-infrastructure, the stuff that turns a simple transaction into a full financial workflow.
If I had to name the innovations that'll matter most: embedded finance, because financial services will increasingly live inside non-financial apps; AI-led risk and compliance, because trust has to scale as fast as access does; and inclusive credit infrastructure that finally brings India's small businesses into the formal fold. UPI democratised payments. The next wave democratises everything around payments.
3. How are Embedded Finance and Banking-as-a-Service transforming the relationship between businesses, consumers, and financial institutions?
They're quietly rewriting the rulebook on who “owns” the financial moment. For a long time, if you wanted a loan, an account or a payout, you went to a bank. Now the bank comes to you, inside the e-commerce app you're already shopping on, the logistics platform you're already using, the software your business already runs on.
For businesses, this is huge. A company that has nothing to do with banking can suddenly offer accounts, payouts, credit or verification to its customers without becoming a bank or spending years on compliance. For consumers, it means finance stops being a separate errand and becomes part of what they're already doing. And for financial institutions, it's a shift from being the destination to being the engine underneath which, if done right, expands their reach far beyond their own branches or apps.
Our role at PaySprint sits right in the middle of that. Products like SprintNXT for business banking APIs exist precisely so a business can embed these capabilities without reinventing the wheel. The relationship is becoming less about “customer and bank” and more about an ecosystem where everyone plugs into shared, trusted rails.
4. As financial ecosystems become increasingly API-driven, what infrastructure and security challenges must fintechs and traditional institutions address?
The honest answer is that openness and security are in constant tension, and managing that tension well is the whole game. The moment you open up financial capabilities through APIs, you're widening the surface area, more connections, more data flowing, more parties in the chain. That's the price of the flexibility everyone wants.
So the challenges cluster into a few areas. First, resilience: when you become the rails, downtime isn't an inconvenience, it's someone's payroll not going out. Uptime and reliability have to be treated as non-negotiable, not a nice-to-have. Second, data security and privacy: every integration point has to be built assuming it will be tested by bad actors, because it will be. Third, compliance at speed: regulation in Indian finance is rightly strict, and the hard part is staying fully compliant while still onboarding a client in minutes rather than months.
The mistake I see is treating security and compliance as a layer you bolt on at the end. We've built PaySprint the other way around: verification, KYC, KYB and secure transaction control (through products like SprintVerify and SprintEXcrow) are part of the foundation, not an afterthought. When you're the infrastructure, trust isn't a feature. It's the product.
5. What role does AI play in fraud detection, compliance, customer onboarding and what safeguards are needed for responsible adoption?
AI is genuinely transforming the parts of finance that used to be slow, manual and error-prone. In fraud detection, it can spot patterns across millions of transactions that no human team ever could, and flag something suspicious in the moment rather than in a report next week. In onboarding, it takes what used to be days of document checks and compresses it into a seamless, near-instant experience. In compliance, it can continuously monitor rather than periodically audit. So the upside is real and it's here.
But, and this is the part I feel strongly about, AI in finance can't be a black box. When a model decides someone is a fraud risk or gets denied onboarding, that decision affects a real person's access to money and dignity. So the safeguards matter as much as the capability. That means human oversight on high-stakes decisions, models you can explain rather than just trust blindly, careful attention to bias so we're not quietly locking out the very people we claim to be including, and airtight data governance underneath all of it.
My view is simple: use AI to remove friction and catch what humans miss, but never let it remove accountability. In our world, “the algorithm decided” can never be an acceptable answer to a customer.
6. How can fintech infrastructure help bridge financial access gaps for India's MSMEs and drive the next wave of financial inclusion?
Inclusion is one of the most important outcomes of good infrastructure, but I'd frame our role in it carefully. PaySprint doesn't reach India's small businesses directly; we build the enterprise-grade rails that power the banks, NBFCs, lenders and platforms who do. And that distinction matters, because the access gap was never about intent. It was about economics. Serving a small business in a tier-3 town was simply too expensive on legacy infrastructure, so the institutions that wanted to serve them couldn't do it viably.
That's exactly the gap enterprise infrastructure closes. When onboarding is digital and instant through verification APIs, when banking, payments and payouts are available as ready integrations, and when escrow and secure transaction control are digitised, the cost of serving the next customer collapses. A lender can extend credit confidently because identity and account verification happen in seconds. A marketplace can settle thousands of small sellers because reconciliation is automated. The enterprise gets scale and compliance; inclusion arrives as a consequence.
At PaySprint, that's how we think about the next wave of financial inclusion. It won't be led by any single hero app. It'll be led by the invisible, enterprise-grade rails that let banks, NBFCs and large platforms profitably reach the millions who were left out. If we build those rails well, inclusion stops being a campaign and becomes the default economics of the system.
