India shouldn't look to West for agentic payment protocols: Pine Labs CEO

Pine Labs has launched an agentic payments protocol for UPI transactions, with CEO Amrish Rau calling for India-led standards in autonomous commerce

India should not look to the West to determine the protocols governing agentic payment transactions, Pine Labs Chief Executive Amrish Rau said on Thursday, as the company launched its Pine Labs Payment Protocol (P3P) for agentic UPI payments. 

Rau said the company was in discussions with card networks to enable card-based transactions through the agentic system, potentially expanding payment options beyond the Unified Payments Interface (UPI). 

He said Pine Labs was the first company to launch an agentic payments protocol within India's regulatory framework, positioning it to potentially emerge as a de facto market standard as adoption among merchants and consumers grows. 

 

“Our responsibility is to create the infrastructure and then transactions will go on building, merchants will come on board, consumer behaviour will change. What is super important is India shouldn't get left behind in this game. India shouldn't be looking to the West to figure out what is the protocol they are doing and how this can be implemented,” Rau said at a press conference after a demonstration of an agent-to-agent transaction. 

The company said that P3P provides the payment and settlement rails for autonomous commerce. It utilises UPI Reserve Pay and one-time mandates for transactions triggered by AI agents. 

Digital gold fintech Gullak is live on P3P, whereas retail electronics chain Vijay Sales is in active proof of concept on the protocol, the company said. 

Rau said the firm was in talks with merchants within the industry to enable adoption of the protocol. 

“Now we have released the protocol, if I can have enough merchants actually consuming this, then there is a higher likelihood for that protocol to become the de facto standard in the market,” he said. 

The company stated that deployments are underway across retail, fintech, travel, and beyond. 

Earlier, agentic workflows faced challenges at checkout when human authentication was required. 

With P3P, agents can execute transactions through user-registered UPI mandates along with an ability to ensure such AI agents do not go rogue through continuous audits, verifiable identity and logs, spend controls, among other things. 

Use cases include an agent’s ability to track prices of flights, precious metals, concert tickets, among other things, and autonomously execute transactions if certain user conditions are met. 

Rau stated that the protocol was "completely compliant" with existing regulatory guidelines. 

He added that while certain transactions would move to agentic rails, TPAPs would continue to stay relevant to the user. 

“One thing which is beyond doubt is there will be a fair amount of transactions where the surface area will not be a TPAP (Third Party Application Provider). The surface area might very well be ChatGPT or Claude, where the transaction is coming from. But I don't see TPAPs going away because that's still the home,” Rau said. 

TPAPs are NPCI-certified UPI apps such as PhonePe, Google Pay, Paytm, among others.