The Smart Shift in Payments: From speed to scale, Intelligence and Trust, George Sam, Co-founder and Business Head, Mindgate

By Vriti Gothi

As real time payments scale beyond speed into interoperability, credit and intelligence, Mindgate outlines how cloud-native platforms, UPI innovation and ecosystem partnerships are reshaping banking for the next billion users.

How do you see real-time payments evolving globally as regulators push for interoperability and 24×7 settlement?

The global real-time payments movement is transitioning from fragmented domestic systems to a unified, multi-rail digital ecosystem. The push for 24×7 settlement and interoperability is the key driver of this shift.

Global Interoperability is the Next Frontier: Instant payments reach their full potential when linked across borders, with initiatives like BIS’s Nexus enabling harmonised frameworks that strengthen trade and financial inclusion.

The Power of 24×7 Data and Liquidity: Instant settlement is reshaping treasury operations, requiring real-time liquidity management. Rich ISO 20022 data is becoming a strategic asset, supporting better fraud detection, reconciliation, and personalised services. Standardisation is accelerating, with countries increasingly mandating common protocols, driving consolidation around API-driven platforms that support multiple instant payment schemes from a single hub.

Standardisation over Fragmentation: We expect more countries to require common protocols, prompting consolidation in payment hubs and adoption of modern, API-driven solutions that can operate across schemes like FedNow, SEPA Instant, Pix, and UPI.

What role will cloud-native payment stacks and API-driven architectures play in modernising legacy banking systems over the next few years?

The shift to a 24×7, high-volume, real-time environment is a major change for traditional banking infrastructure. Legacy batch-processing cores are being complemented by cloud-native payment stacks to meet always-on demands. API-driven architectures enable this through composability, allowing banks to integrate high-performance engines alongside existing cores without full replacements.

APIs are the essential catalysts for modernisation. Acting as universal connectors, they give banks FinTech-like speed, enabling faster product launches and partner integrations. Modernisation is about agility, equipping banks to compete and lead in a real-time economy.

With FinTechs, TPAPs, and Big Tech expanding aggressively into payments, how should banks differentiate their value proposition?

FinTechs and TPAPs prioritise UX and cashback-led growth. Banks should evolve beyond UPI rails, leveraging trust, compliance, balance sheets, and data to embed credit and risk services.

• Product offerings: Banks can underwrite credit, manage deposits, and bundle services into payments, leveraging strong SME relationships amid growing B2B focus.

• Depth of data: Banks have a 360° view of customers across accounts, cards, lending, and UPI behaviour, whereas FinTechs only access transaction-level data.

• Priority segments: Banks should focus on segments where trust and complexity matter—SMEs, affluent individuals, corporates, cross-border, and government payments—rather than massvolume P2P transactions.

• App design considerations: Banks must adopt TPAP-style UX, improving intent flows, notifications, rewards, and delivering differentiated Credit-on-UPI experiences with flexible limits and contextual checkout offers.

• Experience parity and insights: Banks should match FinTechs in agility, reliability, transparency, and UI/UX while providing data-led insights, liquidity alerts, and spend nudges to merchants, SMEs, corporates, and consumers.

• Strong partnerships: While competing, banks can collaborate with TPAPs and FinTechs for high-volume origination and co-branded experiences.

As UPI scales into credit, cross-border, and offline modes, what new challenges and opportunities emerge for ecosystem participants?

UPI is evolving into an economic operating system, where scale and democratisation drive both opportunity and challenge. As UPI expands into credit, real-time transaction data enables precise lending decisions for small merchants and individuals, promoting financial inclusion while requiring careful risk management.

Cross-border payments aim to make remittances faster, cheaper, and more transparent, removing friction for migrants and small traders. Inclusion also demands offline access, ensuring digital finance is a right rather than a privilege. UPI Lite and offline capabilities strengthen this access. The goal is to build resilient rails for 250 billion transactions and bring the next half-billion Indians into a secure, borderless digital economy.

How are large enterprises rethinking collections, reconciliation, and treasury workflows in a real-time payments world?

Corporate treasury has shifted from “control and reporting” to “optimisation and instant decision-making.” ISO 20022 data and instant payments automate reconciliation through straight-through processing. Treasurers now have instant cash visibility, enabling justin-time payments, better working capital management, and reduced liquidity buffers, transforming treasury into a strategic, real-time function.

How is Mindgate positioning its platform and partnerships—such as UPI NXT and global bank collaborations—to stay ahead in next-gen realtime payments?

Our vision is to move beyond being a technology provider to becoming the invisible backbone of the global digital economy. Our strategy transitions from infrastructure leadership to ecosystem-wide value creation, underpinned by Growth & Efficiency.

• Pivoting to the Merchant Economy: Capturing roughly 50% of the UPI Issuing Switch market in India, we have built the most resilient engine for banks. Our next focus is the Acquiring side, creating high-efficiency bridges between complex banking rails and fast-paced retail needs.

• The UPI NXT Era with PayU: Partnering with majority shareholder PayU, serving 4.5 lakh merchants, we launched the UPI NXT stack—a scalable, cloud-native microservice architecture delivering 10,000+ TPS, near-zero declines, and rapid feature rollout, including Credit on UPI, Autopay interoperability, and single-block multi-debit, enabling highperformance merchant payments at scale.

• Efficiency as a Service: Our platform’s cloud-native elasticity ensures operational costs do not scale linearly with transaction volumes. Handling billions of transactions monthly with 99.99% resilience, we provide efficiency that helps banks and merchants maintain high margins in a competitive landscape.

• ‘Make in India’ for the World: Through collaborations with international banks, we are exporting a decade of lessons in realtime excellence, delivering the same resilience and speed globally.

What are the top strategic priorities for Mindgate in 2026 as real-time payments expand into new geographies, use cases, and regulatory frameworks?

By 2026, our strategy balances steady market growth with operational efficiency, refining foundations while expanding global reach.

Country-level Adapters: Global Platform, Local Intelligence: Every market has unique regulatory and settlement requirements. Modular adapters integrate our core platform locally, delivering resilience, scalability, and operational precision.

Maintaining a resilient core: We prioritise resilience, scalability, compliance, and security, investing in cloud-native architecture and AI to achieve near-zero downtime. We aim for “five-nines” resilience, where downtime is virtually non-existent.

Supporting Global Interoperability: Our next growth phase focuses on connecting disparate systems. Acting as a “Payments Translator,” we facilitate connectivity between domestic schemes like FedNow, PIX, and UPI. Participating in initiatives like BIS Nexus, we help banks and corporates navigate cross-border commerce.

Enhancing efficiency through AI: AI and machine learning automate issue analysis, reconciliation, and dispute management, reducing the total cost of ownership for financial institutions.

Developing new use cases: We are shifting from moving money to orchestrating value. API-first solutions like Credit on UPI and automated B2B payments embed financial flexibility at the point of transaction, ensuring liquidity is available precisely when needed.

Toward 2026, our Intelligent Growth prioritises sustainable expansion, expanding footprint and capabilities, as Mindgate remains a trusted partner delivering robust infrastructure for confident innovation and infinite scalability