The Weekly Wrap: all you need to know by Friday COB | Aug 1st

By Puja Sharma

The Weekly Wrap is published every Friday and recaps the week’s main stories and deals, as well as upcoming events and announcements for Prime subscribers only.

The Big Story

In a move set to elevate the resilience and efficiency of India’s digital payments landscape, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has announced a major upgrade to the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) platform, effective 1 August 2025. These measures represent a critical milestone in NPCI’s ongoing digital transformation strategy, reinforcing UPI’s stature as the backbone of India’s rapidly expanding real-time payments infrastructure.

The enhancements focus on optimising technical reliability, strengthening fraud prevention, and advancing customer experience through smarter API management. Banks and payment service providers (PSPs) are now required to implement revised standards across key UPI functions, including balance enquiries, mandate execution, transaction verification, and account information retrieval. These changes follow an extensive analysis of user behaviour and transaction volume patterns across India’s financial ecosystem.

Under the updated framework, usage of UPI’s most-frequented APIs such as Balance Enquiry, List Account, and Transaction Status will now be governed by newly enforced thresholds and retry limits. For instance, users will be able to initiate a maximum of 50 balance enquiries and 25 account-list retrievals per UPI application in a rolling 24-hour period. Transaction status checks will be limited to three attempts per transaction with a mandatory 90-second interval between each, designed to mitigate excessive server load and improve overall system responsiveness.

Deals of the week

• InTick raises $2.6m to scale automated derivatives platform
• Ramp secures $500m to expand AI automation
• Salient raises $60m to automate loan servicing with AI
• LegalOn secures $50m to scale legal AI globally
• dLocal and RizRemit boost remittances in Africa, Asia
• Zaggle acquires Rio Money to expand into digital consumer lending
• EazyPay, Mastercard boost B2B payments in Bahrain
• Payroc to acquire BlueSnap to enhance cross-border payment
• CIX, Australian FinTech partner to unify APAC carbon markets

Be on the lookout for

Nominate Now!!

The IBSi Global FinTech Innovation Awards 2025, set to take place on 21st November in Mumbai, will once again spotlight the most disruptive and transformative achievements in banking and financial technology. Now in its seventh year, the awards honour innovation across high-impact categories such as Core Banking, Digital Lending, AI/ML, and GenAI.

After a record-breaking 2024 edition—which drew 400+ submissions from 155 banks and 90 tech vendors—the upcoming awards are poised to set an even higher benchmark. Expect broader global participation, richer insights into bank–tech collaboration, and a data-driven judging process powered by IBS Intelligence’s proprietary research and analytics.

Beyond trophies, winners benefit from year-long visibility through editorial features, thought leadership opportunities, and industry event integrations—making this a platform not just for recognition, but for continued growth and influence.

Whether you’re a startup reimagining digital onboarding or an established bank modernising at scale, GFIA 2025 offers the stage to showcase your innovation, impact, and scalability to the global fintech community.