At the Global Fintech Fest 2025, Razorpay CEO and Co-Founder Harshil Mathur painted a transformative picture of online payments, emphasising how artificial intelligence (AI) will soon make financial processes invisible and instantaneous. During a fireside chat, Mathur highlighted the shift toward truly embedded finance, where payments and credit happen seamlessly in the background, allowing consumers to focus solely on their purchases.
Mathur stressed that while the industry has long discussed embedded finance, it remains incomplete. “Since many years, we have been speaking about embedded finance, but we are still not fully there. It is still a separate step in every transaction. So if you’re taking credit for a purchase, there’s still a whole process for it,” he said. He pointed to the “APIfication” of banking as a step forward but noted that much ground remains to be covered.
Prediction Made By Razorpay CEO Harshil Mathur
The Razorpay leader predicted rapid acceleration through AI, envisioning a world where transactions are frictionless. “With AI, that change is going to come far more faster where the time that you are purchasing something, your payments and credit are sorted in the background,” Mathur explained. He contrasted this with social media platforms that aim to maximise user time, adding, “The amount of time people spend on financial services, I personally dislike it a lot. Unlike social media, where companies are trying to maximise time, with payment services, we are trying to minimise the time spent when purchasing any product online.”
Mathur expressed optimism about crossing this threshold soon. “We are yet to cross that cusp where somebody wants to consume something and the financial services that is needed gets sorted in the background. We are going to see this happen soon, where customers are able to purchase things online, and the payment will happen within a span of one second or two seconds,” he asserted. He credited AI for driving this evolution, noting, “AI is at forefront of making this happen. The speed at which underwriting is possible, KYC is possible, the speed at which financial disbursement is possible is just going up through the roof.”
Alongside these advancements, Mathur addressed the parallel upgrades in security. “Along with that cyber security and fraud management are also robustly upgrading. We are at a point where financial services can be very transparent so that customers can focus in consumption and not worry about to financial service they are using,” he said, underscoring a future where trust and efficiency coexist without user intervention.
Fellow panelists provided context that reinforced Mathur’s vision. Paromi Chatterjee, CEO of Revolut India, echoed the theme of invisible finance, stating, “The real embedded finance goal is when the finance is not visible at all, is the boundary that I believe will be crossed through AI.” She also highlighted the importance of customer love in an interoperable ecosystem, noting that profits will depend on how much customers adore a product.
TS Anil, CEO of Monzo Bank, complemented this by reframing data’s role in customer-centric innovation. “People say that Data is the new oil. I believe, that data is the new solar power. Everybody will have access to it, and how you are able to harness it and how you are able to build a relationship with your customer, that’s going to be the real motto in future businesses,” Anil said. Chatterjee built on this, calling data “the new compass which gives you the direction and indicates where the customer wants you to go.”
