From Gateway to Operating System: SabPaisa's AI-Led Strategic Pivot

Commerce at scale isn't just about moving money. It is about managing data, compliance, orchestration and speed across a system that rarely pauses.

In the third episode of SabPaisa AI Unplugged, the lens moved from developers and product velocity to leadership-level strategy. Hosted by Gaurav Choudhury, Group Consulting Editor, Network18, the conversation featured Amit Tyagi, Chief Technology Officer at SabPaisa, who has overseen what he described as a complete systemic overhaul inside the company.

The central question was not whether AI can accelerate development. It was more fundamental: how do you pause a nine-year-old payments business, rethink its architecture and reposition it for what comes next?

The Strategic Pivot: Overhauling a Nine-Year-Old System

SabPaisa began as a B2B collections and disbursement platform. Over nearly a decade, legacy systems accumulated, partnerships deepened and operational complexity grew. The arrival of AI, Amit Tyagi suggested, created both an opportunity and a forcing function. "One year back, we decided that we will transform the entire system," he said. The decision, he noted, began at the management level. "We took the hard decision."

That decision was not incremental. It involved giving developers broader access and mandate to rebuild, rethink and accelerate. In the past three months alone, he said, the company launched almost 12 to 14 products using AI. The claim is ambitious, but the emphasis was less on the number and more on the shift in operating rhythm. Prototyping that once took months can now take days. "To create a prototype… it takes hardly like one day, two days," he said, particularly when responding to custom requirements from banks and enterprise clients.

Yet Amit Tyagi stopped short of declaring SabPaisa fully AI-native. "I will not say that we are completely an AI native company now," he said. "But yes, we are trying to build all the required solutions… in the coming future." The transformation, in his framing, is ongoing; and strategic, rather than cosmetic.

From B2B Collections to Enterprise Platform

The deeper shift is one of positioning. SabPaisa started with collections infrastructure. Today, its portfolio includes Settlepaisa for settlements, Quickpaisa for collections, Exchange for routing and orchestration, and conversational interfaces layered on top. The ambition, Amit Tyagi indicated, is to consolidate these into a unified SaaS platform for enterprise clients.

"We are moving into enterprise," he said. Solutions that were initially built for internal efficiency are now being packaged as plug-and-play offerings. Exchange, for instance, is positioned as an orchestration layer for banks. Settlepaisa is being offered beyond SabPaisa's internal ecosystem. The objective is platformisation - bringing discovery, onboarding, KYC, routing, settlement and analytics under one operating layer rather than dispersing them across fragmented tools.

Compliance, however, remains a structural constraint. With evolving RBI norms and increasing scrutiny on AI usage in financial services, fintechs operate under tight regulatory guardrails. Amit Tyagi acknowledged the investment required to stay compliant, especially in partnership-heavy ecosystems involving banks and NPCI.

At the same time, he argued that regulatory friction follows a familiar curve. "Maybe four years back, everybody was hesitating to make transactions over any app," he noted. Today, digital onboarding and KYC are standardised and widely accepted. The implication is that AI-enabled compliance systems will mature in similar fashion.

But scale demands foresight. India processes some of the highest volumes of real-time payments globally. He cited January's UPI transaction volume of 27.6 billion as an indicator of the operating environment. "In India, you cannot say you are building the solution," he said. "You have to build the solution in such a way that it should have all the scalability things in place."

For SabPaisa, that means treating infrastructure as the core product, not backend plumbing.

Scale, Language and the Agentic AI Era

If enterprise ambition defines the company's internal pivot, inclusion defines its outward ambition. India's next growth wave lies beyond metro centres. Tier 2, Tier 3 and Tier 4 cities and vernacular-speaking users represent a large share of future transaction growth. Language barriers, Amit Tyagi acknowledged, have historically limited reach.

"By using AI, now we are breaking this language barrier," he said. SabPaisa is building AI conversational bots integrated into its systems to assist users navigating payment flows or resolving issues. The idea is to reduce friction for merchants and customers who may not operate in English-first digital environments.

The conversation then moved into more speculative territory: agentic commerce. "I will say we are close to making it a reality now," Tyagi said, referring to AI agents capable of automating large portions of operational workflows. In the coming year, he suggested, startups may operate with leaner human teams, with automation handling repetitive processes. He was careful, however, to draw a boundary. Automation may expand, but compliance and validation will continue to require human oversight. In fintech, delegation has limits.

The broader trajectory, as he described it, is expansion. AI is not just accelerating build cycles; it is enabling companies to reach segments previously considered operationally expensive or technically complex.

Building the Operating Layer

As the episode concluded, the conversation crystallised around one idea: SabPaisa is no longer positioning itself as a payment gateway alone. It is attempting to build what Gaurav Choudhury described as a unified merchant operating system. The distinction matters. A gateway processes transactions. An operating system orchestrates discovery, onboarding, routing, settlement, compliance and analytics in one coherent layer.

AI, in this context, is not the product. It is the acceleration layer beneath the platform ambition. It compresses prototype cycles, lowers customization costs and enables orchestration at scale. But strategic clarity determines what gets built - and for whom.

If the earlier episodes examined development velocity and engineering leverage, this one examined governance and direction. The pivot from B2B collections to enterprise platform is less about adding products and more about redefining SabPaisa's place in India's payments infrastructure.

The transformation is ongoing. The ambition is clear: build for scale, build for compliance and build for a market where speed is assumed.

Moneycontrol Journalist are not involved in the creation of the article.