India has made digital payments as simple as scanning a QR code. The next opportunity lies in using payments to connect consumers with relevant financial products and help businesses address the challenges of growing online.

At TechSparks 2026, Deep Agrawal, Head of Payments at PhonePe, and Khilan Haria, Chief Product Officer at Razorpay, joined Madanmohan Rao, Research Director at YourStory, for a panel discussion titled ‘Beyond transactions: Solving financial inclusion with contextual money’.

The discussion covered how payments are becoming part of a wider digital experience, from improving transaction success rates to helping merchants attract and retain customers.

Agrawal said digital payments have become part of everyday life for more than 500 million UPI users, who use the system to send money to friends, pay electricity bills, shop online, and make payments at stores.

However, the next challenge is to bring another 500 million people into the digital payments ecosystem while helping existing users access financial products beyond payments.

Haria said Razorpay’s experience working with millions of small and medium businesses has shown that merchants face several challenges once they have the infrastructure to collect payments, including attracting customers, improving conversions, and encouraging repeat purchases.

“Over the years, we’ve learned as we’ve worked with millions of these SMBs. The larger problem sometimes goes beyond payments. Payments is what I now call the core infrastructure that SMBs need to set up their digital commerce or online business. But beyond that, the struggle most businesses go through is ‘how do I get demand?

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