Payments firm Pine Labs partners OpenAI to build conversational AI tools for merchants

Pine Labs partners OpenAI

• Pine Labs partners with OpenAI to add AI to payment solutions
• AI will automate tasks like payments, settlements, and queries
• Merchants can use chatbots for transaction and payment management

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Merchant commerce platform Pine Labs has partnered with OpenAI to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into its payments and merchant services solutions to make payment gateways more responsive and automated, it said in a media statement on February 19.

The collaboration will see Pine Labs use OpenAI’s models within its existing platforms and solutions to help merchants manage routine financial processes such as recurring payments, supplier settlements and customer queries through conversational interfaces, it added.

“For decades, commerce has been built on passive systems that simply follow instructions. We are moving beyond that era to build an active, intelligent layer for business by building the first agentic stack,” said B Amrish Rau, CEO, Pine Labs

The solution will enable businesses to interact with their payment systems in natural language. For example, using chatbots, merchants can ask the system to reconcile transactions, schedule payments, or flag delays. Currently, merchants manually navigate dashboards or back-end systems to figure out and address such issues.

“The next phase of AI is about moving from information to action. We are helping to create innovation that turns complex financial workflows into seamless, agentic experiences at scale,” said Oliver Jay, managing director, International at OpenAI.

Pine Labs said the new layer will sit on top of its existing infrastructure, which already handles merchant payments across online and offline channels. The AI tools are expected to help merchants reduce manual effort in managing day-to-day financial operations.

India’s digital payments ecosystem has expanded sharply over the past decade, led by the rise of QR-based UPI payments at merchants. UPI now processes more than 21 billion digital transactions monthly, of which two-thirds are merchant transactions.

Founded in 1998, Pine Labs started as a point-of-sale solutions provider and has since expanded into online payments, merchant lending and cross-border commerce. It works with banks, payment networks and merchants, and competes with other payment aggregators and gateway providers in India’s crowded fintech market.

The companies said that all such actions would operate within regulatory and security requirements applicable to financial services. It added that human review mechanisms would remain in place where necessary.

Pine Labs said it also plans to make these AI capabilities available to third-party developers building applications on its platform. This could allow fintech startups and software providers to build tools for merchants that combine payments with automated financial management.