Razorpay forays into UPI infrastructure space, offers UPI Switch

Fintech major Razorpay, in partnership with Airtel Payments Bank, has forayed into UPI infrastructure service by offering UPI Switch to its customers. 

The company will now provide its UPI Switch service to Airtel Payments Bank, enabling it to manage UPI transactions on the payments bank's platform. 

Razorpay plans to offer the service to more banks in the future, the company's chief executive officer (CEO), Harshil Mathur said. 
 

"Airtel (payments bank) is our first customer with this product. We will be providing the service to more bank over a period of time," he told Business Standard. 

The solution can handle up to 10,000 transactions per second (TPS), and enables five times faster access to Unified Payments Interface (UPI) innovations for businesses, the company said.  

It claims that its UPI Switch resolves issues seven times faster, within 24 hours, as compared to the industry average of seven days. 

“This venture into UPI Infrastructure marks a strategic move to manage the end-to-end merchant experience and provide the industry's leading stack. With latency below 100 milliseconds, a 4-5 per cent increase in success rates, and features customized to suit business needs, our switch is crafted to enrich the payment experience and ensure that businesses can now manage the surge in UPI transactions on any sale or non-sale day,” Khilan Haria, Head of Payments Product, Razorpay. 

The Bengaluru-based company said its UPI Switch will boost the success rate of transactions by 4-5 per cent. 
 

“Our integration with Razorpay's UPI Switch, a cloud-based infrastructure for the most advanced UPI Stack, ensures 99.99% uptime and enables up to 10,000 plus transactions per second,” Ganesh Ananthanarayanan, Chief Operating Officer (COO), Airtel Payments Bank.

While processing a UPI transaction, banks connect with existing UPI infrastructure to connect core banking systems and UPI technology. This infrastructure is called a UPI switch and is powered by Technology Service Providers (TSPs) for banks.

Razorpay received a final approval from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in December last year to operate as a payment aggregator, enabling it to onboard new merchants after a nearly one-year-old regulatory ban. 

In February this year, it made a series of product announcements, which include an upgraded payment gateway, a point-of-sale (PoS) device, a marketing stack, and an AI (artificial intelligence) assistant for payments and payrolls. The company also said that it recorded a total payment volume of $150 billion in 2023.