70% fraud detection, 10-min go-lives: Inside Cashfree’s AI-driven payments core with Ramkumar Venkatesan & Mayank Juneja

As India’s digital economy matures from simple online transactions to AI-driven commerce, Cashfree Payments is evolving far beyond its origins as a payment gateway company. What started a decade ago as a payouts platform has steadily transformed into what Ramkumar Venkatesan, CTO, Cashfree Payments, describes as a “fintech operating system”, a technology layer designed to handle everything from payments and identity verification to fraud detection, compliance, and increasingly, AI-powered automation.

“The first product that Cashfree started with was payouts, money going out,” says Venkatesan. “Very soon after that, we got into the payment gateway business as well. Since then, we’ve expanded into adjacent areas like SecureID and Shield, which are closely related to payments and trust.”

That expansion mirrors a broader shift happening across fintech globally. Payments are no longer just about moving money between accounts, rather they are becoming intelligent infrastructure layers capable of ...