Razorpay focuses on AI-powered banking tools ahead of planned IPO

Business Standard

a day ago

Razorpay is positioning its business banking platform as an AI-powered assistant to chief financial officers. The move comes as India's fintech giant, valued at $7.5 billion, prepares for a public offering within 18 months and seeks to stand out in the neobanking market. RazorpayX now handles 5 per cent of all digital money transfers or Immediate Payment Service (IMPS) in India and processes $30 billion in annualised transaction volume, growing 85 per cent year-over-year. The platform automates financial tasks from cash flow forecasting to payroll reconciliation, making it Razorpay's fastest-growing division and a cornerstone of its IPO strategy. 'I don't think we're saying — even to an extent — that we're replacing a human CFO. The idea is to assist a human CFO,' said Harshil Mathur, chief executive officer and co-founder of Razorpay. 'Your CFO office doesn't need that many people. And we can give interesting, actionable insights to CFOs and financial decision-makers without having a large team.' Its AI-powered payroll system, built via Opfin, automates end-to-end processing and compliance, while detecting errors and predicting risks in real time. Machine learning models now drive smart reconciliation, matching invoices with transactions, spotting mismatches or duplicates, and slashing manual effort by over 80 per cent. The company recently launched an AI-driven 'Know Your Payslip' feature, where employees can ask questions about their payroll calculations, tax deductions, and salary components through a chatbot. 'We now have 'Smart AI-powered Cash Flow Forecasting', which is based on your income and expenses in your bank account. We can project cash flows in advance and give you financial decision flow,' said Mathur. More than 50,000 customers — including large firms such as Swiggy, Meesho, Cred, Upstox, and Bharti AXA Life Insurance — have adopted RazorpayX to streamline financial operations. Today, Mathur said 70 per cent of India's unicorns use RazorpayX for smarter and faster financial operations. The company processes 1.7 million salary disbursements every month, making it one of the largest payroll players in the country. One of the customers is gaming platform Zupee, which uses an AI-powered routing engine to deliver reward payouts to millions of users within seconds, maintaining a success rate of over 99.8 per cent. Razorpay recently launched the RazorpayX corporate credit card in partnership with Mastercard, RBL Bank, and Yes Bank, offering up to ₹2 crore credit to firms. IPO Strategy Mathur said that RazorpayX is becoming a higher growth engine for the firm that's moving even faster than its payments platform. An 85 per cent growth rate allows the company to have a much faster growth rate as an organisation rather than just a single entity. 'And I think from that perspective, heading into an IPO, we feel this adds a lot of value to our overall story as not just being a payments company, but a full-stack financial services firm,' said Mathur. Mathur said that two years ago, 90 per cent of the company's revenue came from payments. That figure has since dropped to 75 per cent, with RazorpayX and other services now contributing 25 per cent. He expects the split to shift further to 70:30 within the next 12 to 18 months. The revenue of Razorpay, founded by IIT-Roorkee graduates Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar in 2014, increased 9 per cent to ₹2,501 crore in the 2023-24 financial year, from ₹2,293 crore a year ago. Its net profit rose fivefold to ₹34 crore during the same period. The firm has an annualised total payment volume (TPV) of $180 billion. It is eyeing $1 billion in revenue by 2030. The reduced funding environment has actually benefited RazorpayX's growth. Mathur said that if there's too much funding available in the ecosystem, nobody really cares about optimisation. 'The last couple of years taught us that funding hasn't gone away—but it's available for the most optimised and prudent companies,' he explained. Razorpay competes with players like Stripe, PayPal, PayU, and Paytm. With the expansion of RazorpayX, the company is also entering territory traditionally dominated by established banks with long-standing regulatory ties and infrastructure. 'In India, I don't think anyone else is even close to what we are doing. We are clear market leaders in the payouts and disbursal category, and now we are adding an AI layer on top of it,' said Mathur. He said the company has a 150-member data team focused on leveraging RazorpayX's data to generate deeper, business-specific insights as part of its AI-driven initiatives. Global Expansion Mathur views regulatory changes from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) as largely positive. "My belief is that what the RBI has been doing — or the regulator — is drawing the rules more clearly in terms of how different players can operate, and mostly it has been fairly positive," he said. RBI's recent move to open up cross-border payments under the 'payment aggregators cross-border' framework allows firms like Razorpay to facilitate both import and export transactions, expanding their role in global payments.