AI-led personalisation to open opportunities for new startups: Razorpay CEO

Razorpay CEO Harshil Mathur said AI could lower personalisation costs and help startups target niches such as Gen Z payments, HNI wealth management and multilingual platforms.

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) will lower the cost of personalisation within the financial technology sector opening up new market niches for upcoming startups, Harshil Mathur, cofounder and chief executive officer (CEO), Razorpay said on Monday.  

Mathur explained that new market niches within the sector could open up for new players such as payments for GenZ users, wealth management for high net-worth (HNI) individuals, multi-lingual platforms, among others.  

“AI allows you to personalise. So, you can create an app in 20 languages today on day one because AI allows you to do that. Earlier, it was a lot of engineering effort and cost to do that,” Mathur said.  

 

He was speaking at the Global Fintech Fest 2026 in Mumbai.  

Mathur explained that India’s dominance in the world’s digital payments space presented an opportunity to now expand to global markets, especially in regions such as South East Asia.  

“If a company is successful in India, there is a massive opportunity. We are expanding to Malaysia, Singapore and multiple markets. If one has solved for so many use cases, built that complex depth of product that is required to serve the complexity of India, you are in the best place to serve...” he added.  

India’s real-time payments rail Unified Payments Interface’s (UPI) model, which involves a public-private collaboration, was unique to the country, he said.  

“Public-private collaboration, ...you’ll see that the regulators and policy makers set the base rail and the private players collaborate and build on top of it. I think that is very unique to India. I haven't seen that in any part of the world,” he said.