Cashfree’s Relay employs AI agents to handle routine payment follow-ups for SMBs, aiming to enhance customer engagement and cut operational workload, with automation already in beta and built on secure in-house infrastructure.
Cashfree is pitching Relay as an AI system that can take over much of the routine work tied to payment follow-ups for small and midsised businesses, from abandoned carts and failed transactions to subscription renewals, refunds and disputes. The company says the aim is to catch customers while intent is still fresh, rather than treating missed payments as a back-office chore that is reviewed long after the opportunity has passed.
According to Cashfree, many SMBs still handle payment operations manually, with staff spending significant time chasing failed orders and renewals. Relay is designed to reduce that burden by reading transaction records and deciding the next step itself, while still asking for approval before a payment is moved or a customer is contacted. Cashfree says users can describe the desired outcome in plain language rather than building workflows from scratch.
The system is organised around a set of specialist agents, each focused on a specific task. One handles cart recovery by reviewing order history, payment attempts and related details before reaching out. Others are built for cash-on-delivery confirmation, payment retries, subscription recovery, dispute responses and refund screening. Cashfree says these agents share context, so learning from one task can improve another.
That approach echoes a wider push across the payments and collections market towards AI tools that automate recovery work. Vocis, for example, focuses on dispute recovery and chargeback response, while CashVigil and Slicker target failed recurring payments and involuntary churn for subscription businesses. Acruvo and SecureShieldPay are also applying AI to invoice recovery and chargeback management, suggesting that payment operations is becoming a crowded area for agent-style software.
Cashfree says Relay is already running in beta for merchants using its platform and is built on its own infrastructure, with business data kept away from external AI providers. The company argues that keeping the records, actions and approvals in one place improves security and makes the system more practical than a patchwork of point tools. It also says the automation can cut payment-operations work from hours each week to a far smaller amount of oversight, freeing staff to focus on sales and growth.
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