PhonePe, Razorpay, Cashfree Payments and PayU are automating fraud detection and containment as attacks accelerate and UPI volumes reach a record.
India’s leading digital payments companies are strengthening their cyber defences as attacks on financial firms grow more frequent and more sophisticated, with executives saying the shift is being driven by AI-enabled intrusions that move too quickly for manual controls alone. According to The Economic Times, PhonePe, Razorpay, Cashfree Payments and PayU are adding automated security tools, tightening controls on fund movements and building systems that can spot suspicious activity in real time.
Cashfree Payments chief technology officer Ramkumar Venkatesan told The Economic Times that the company has faced repeated attempted attacks over the past three weeks, at a pace he said was at least 10 times higher than a year earlier. He said attackers are increasingly combining multiple weaknesses to gain access, rather than relying on a single flaw. The report said the broader wave of breaches across Indian financial services has pushed firms to move beyond simply blocking intrusions and towards detecting and containing them before customer money or data is affected.
The companies are taking different approaches to that goal. The Economic Times said PhonePe now scores the risk of each transaction within milliseconds and can pause suspicious settlements or redirect payments. Cashfree is pushing security fixes more quickly and isolating systems that may have been compromised. PayU is using artificial intelligence for security analysis and compliance checks, while Razorpay has expanded simulated attacks on its own systems and now runs round-the-clock monitoring. The common thread, according to the report, is automation: as hostile tools operate at machine speed, firms are trying to make their defences respond just as quickly.
The pressure is rising as digital payments volumes continue to climb. Data from the National Payments Corporation of India show the Unified Payments Interface handled a record 25.47 billion transactions worth 31.53 lakh crore rupees in October 2026, lifting the stakes for merchants, banks and payment aggregators that sit between them. The Economic Times also reported that about 20 Indian financial institutions were hit by cyberattacks in October, while the Reserve Bank of India has tightened scrutiny of banks, fintechs and non-banking lenders, including checks on application programming interfaces, or APIs, the software links that let systems exchange data. NPCI has also signed a cybersecurity partnership with IIIT Hyderabad to help strengthen defences across the payments ecosystem.
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