Experts at the Business Standard BFSI Insight Summit 2026 called for better intelligence sharing and stronger coordination among payment platforms to curb digital fraud, as fraudsters increasingly use artificial intelligence (AI) and social engineering to target users.
Speaking at a panel discussion titled ‘Payments at scale, can security match it?’ moderated by Business Standard's Ajinkya Kawale, experts said payment companies need to share more transaction signals, improve fraud detection and strengthen checks to identify suspicious payments. They also highlighted the need to educate users, verify identities more effectively and help victims recover money quickly.
K Satyanarayana Raju, managing director and chief executive officer of Indian Digital Payment Intelligence Corporation (IDPIC), said with rising frauds, trust needs to be established with people.
Arif Khan, chief information officer of Razorpay, said the challenge was no longer limited to securing payments but also involved protecting the individuals and entities making them. With fraudsters becoming more sophisticated with the help of AI, platforms need to examine transaction signals more closely to understand the intent and context of payments, he said.
“I think there has to be much more signal sharing and networking,” Khan said, calling for better coordination to identify and prevent fraudulent transactions.
Karan Sapra, head of payments and financial services India at Google Pay, also stressed the need for better intelligence sharing.
“Better intel sharing is a great first step,” Sapra said, calling for greater user awareness and the use of AI to identify suspicious transaction patterns.
According to Sapra, AI could help identify transactions that appeared unusual by analysing large volumes of signals and communicating warnings to users in a language they understood.
Money transferred to mule accounts difficult to recover
Lalit Chowdhary, senior vice-president at Mindgate Solutions, said many frauds originated at the edges of the payment ecosystem, even as larger banks adopted frameworks to identify suspicious transactions.
He said fraudsters often transferred money quickly into mule accounts, making it difficult for victims to recover their funds.
While fraud remained relatively small when viewed against the overall UPI ecosystem, there was a need for practical measures to ensure victims could recover their money faster, Chowdhary said.
Khan also highlighted the need to strengthen checks on the credit side, saying there was considerable validation on the debit side but less attention to credit transactions.
He cautioned against relying only on the ratio of fraud to sales to assess the problem. Other indicators, including how long mule accounts had existed, also needed to be considered, he said.
Stronger checks needed on credit transactions
Chowdhary said payment systems needed to strengthen fraud checks on the credit side. While banks conducted real-time checks when money was debited, credit transactions largely passed through the banking system, he said.
He suggested that regulatory checks and transaction scoring could help address this gap. He also called for solutions similar to anti-money laundering systems used in international payments, particularly to identify cases in which people were coerced into transferring money.
Chowdhary said payment companies were working with other players to introduce Silent Mobile Verification (SMV) during user registration. He added that fraudsters often remained a step or two ahead of those trying to stop them.
Khan said that established financial institutions could face different technology risks from newer companies. Older banks often operated legacy core banking systems and databases that could contain outdated code and vulnerabilities. Newer companies, many of which were built on cloud infrastructure, could have fewer such vulnerabilities, but still needed to protect their systems. He said the scale of India's digital payments ecosystem was manageable, given improvements in computing power, chips, networks and bandwidth.
The experts also called for stronger links between users and their devices to prevent OTP-related fraud and device takeovers. Sapra said identity verification needed to establish a reliable connection between a user, the device and its ownership without making payments cumbersome.
 "Better intelligence sharing key to curbing digital fraud, say experts")
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