For digital payments to work for Bharat, getting someone to make their first transaction is only the beginning. The bigger challenge is making sure they feel confident enough to return, whether they are shopping online in their preferred language, making a payment independently, or running a small business.

At TechSparks 2026, Sagar Kumar, Vice President of Engineering at PayU, joined Shivani Muthanna, Senior Director – Strategic Content & Video at YourStory, for a fireside chat on the engineering behind inclusive digital payments.

Having worked at early-stage startups and on systems handling millions of transactions, Kumar explained how engineering priorities change as businesses scale.

In the early stages, startup teams focus on speed, launching products quickly and learning as they go. But architecture remains important. Loosely coupled systems make it easier to add new business verticals without rebuilding everything from scratch.

At scale, speed is still important, but there is less room for error. Feature flags, incremental rollouts and A/B testing allow teams to introduce changes gradually, test them with specific customer groups and limit the impact of potential problems.

“Speed is the constant. It's just that the room for error will be smaller when you grow to a larger scale ecosystem, and in that process, you have to build enough safety nets,” he said.

With UPI now familiar to many users in smaller cities and towns, Kumar believes the next step is to make online payments as intuitive as offline transactions.

PayU’s checkout pages default to a scan-and-pay option, offering an experience similar to what customers are used to at physical stores.

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