Razorpay forays into UPI infrastructure space, offers UPI Switch

Fintech major Razorpay, in partnership with Airtel Payments Bank, has ventured into UPI infrastructure service by offering UPI Switch to its customers.

The solution can handle up to 10,000 transactions per second (TPS), and enables five times faster access to Unified Payments Interface (UPI) innovations for businesses, the company said.

It claims that its UPI Switch resolves issues seven times faster, within 24 hours, as compared to the industry average of seven days.

“This venture into UPI infrastructure marks a strategic move to manage the end-to-end merchant experience and provide the industry's leading stack.

With latency below 100 milliseconds, a 4-5 per cent increase in success rates, and features customised to suit business needs, our switch is crafted to enrich the payment experience. It ensures that businesses can manage the surge in UPI transactions on any sale or non-sale day,” Khilan Haria, head of payments product, Razorpay.

“Our integration with Razorpay's UPI Switch, a Cloud-based infrastructure for the most advanced UPI Stack, ensures 99.99 per cent uptime. It enables over 10,000 transactions per second,” Ganesh Ananthanarayanan, chief operating officer (COO), Airtel Payments Bank.

While processing a UPI transaction, banks connect with existing UPI infrastructure to connect core banking systems and UPI technology.

This infrastructure is called UPI switch and is powered by Technology Service Providers (TSPs) for banks.

Razorpay received final approval from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in December last year to operate as a payment aggregator. This enabled it to onboard new merchants after a nearly one-year-old regulatory ban.

In February, it made a series of product announcements.

This includes an upgraded payments gateway, a point-of-sale (PoS) device, a marketing stack, and an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant for payments and payrolls.

The company recorded a total payment volume of $150 billion in 2023.