Cashfree Payments launches in-chat payments for AI apps

By Vriti Gothi

Bengaluru-based FinTech firm Cashfree Payments has introduced Cashfree Here, a payments extension designed to enable transactions directly within conversational AI environments. The solution was unveiled at the India AI Impact Summit in collaboration with Mastercard and Swiggy.

The extension allows businesses to accept UPI and card payments natively inside AI chat interfaces, including applications built on platforms such as OpenAI and Anthropic. By embedding checkout functionality within conversations, the company aims to address a growing friction point in AI-driven commerce, where users are typically redirected to external payment pages to complete transactions.

Cashfree said the solution acts as a PCI-compliant payment layer for AI apps developed using OpenAI’s Apps SDK and Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP). Card transactions are secured through passkey-based biometric authentication supported by Mastercard, offering an alternative to traditional one-time password (OTP) flows.

“Every major shift in commerce has been defined by a new interface, from physical stores to websites and mobile apps. We are now entering the era of AI conversations, where users don’t browse, they ask,” said Nitin Pulyani, SVP and Head of Product at Cashfree Payments. “With Cashfree Here, we are making payments a native part of AI conversations, enabling a new way for businesses to sell and engage in an AI-first world.”

Mastercard said the collaboration focuses on maintaining trust as commerce moves into conversational environments. “Passkey-enabled biometric authentication within AI-native applications will ensure consumers can transact with confidence even as experiences become more seamless,” said Gautam Aggarwal, President, India & South Asia at Mastercard.

For Swiggy, which is expanding the use of conversational AI across its services, the development supports efforts to integrate discovery, ordering and payments within a single interaction. “As AI-driven interfaces become more central to everyday commerce, both ordering and payments must remain intuitive and frictionless,” said CTO Madhusudhan Rao.

The launch follows Cashfree’s earlier introduction of agentic payments, which enabled AI agents to manage payment conversations with customers. With Cashfree Here, the company is extending this capability by rendering the payment interface directly inside chat environments, creating an end-to-end workflow from product discovery to transaction completion.