In an exclusive conversation with Musharrat Shahin, Chief Sub-Editor at FE B2B, Kaushik Mukherjee, CTO at super.money, shares how UPI is evolving into a full-stack financial ecosystem, the challenges of scaling fintech infrastructure, and what will define the next phase of digital payments in India.
1. UPI is now moving beyond payments into credit and financial services. What key changes do you expect in this next phase of growth?
At super.money, we believe UPI is evolving from a payments rail into a real-time financial services layer. This shift will be powered by scalable, cloud-native infrastructure, supported by consented data-sharing, real-time decisioning, and stronger identity and fraud controls – all operating within NPCI-led guardrails to ensure standardisation, auditability, and trust at scale. Data will become one of the fundamental pillars. With the emergence of user-based data-sharing systems, granular, time-bound consent protocols will enable more precise credit score evaluation without compromising data privacy.
At the same time, AI-based risk assessments and alternative data will enable a clearer contextual perspective. In terms of architecture, there will be a shift towards more lightweight, modular ecosystems supporting all stages of the credit life cycle, along with standardised open APIs. In terms of the user interface, the trend will be towards greater abstraction and more intuitive interfaces. Constructs such as BNPL, one-click credit, instant provisioning, and continuous KYC will make financial services more seamless and embedded.
On the other hand, security and fraud prevention are areas that will attract more attention due to ecosystem-wide cooperation, multi-factor authentication, and proactive detection methods. Therefore, the next phase of UPI will not just be about scale, but will be about building a deeply integrated, intelligent, and secure financial ecosystem on top of the existing rails.
2. At very high transaction volumes, reliability becomes critical. How do you ensure your systems remain stable, fast, and always available?
At super.money, reliability at scale is a layered strategy. We build resilience from the bottom up with redundancy, graceful degradation, and continuous chaos testing. This is backed by operational precision viz : kill switches to isolate issues instantly, auto-scaling to handle spikes, and real-time anomaly detection to catch problems early. Moreover, reliability is not confined to our infrastructure alone; we treat our external partners with the same level of respect and set clear Service Level Agreements (SLA), incident handling policies, and escalation procedures for them. In the end, a product's reliability can be judged by the weakest link in the chain, and we make sure that it never becomes the cause of our failure.
3. Given that the credit process will be superimposed on top of the UPI system, what will be the key concerns for managing risk, fraud, and compliance?
As credit gets layered onto UPI, the challenge increasingly becomes one of balance, which is about enabling speed while preserving trust. This is achieved through the use of robust identity binding alongside privacy-centric data handling, which ensures that user data is safe while also being used in an ethical manner. Simultaneously, risk orchestration in real time, as well as proactive fraud detection tools, allow us to detect and respond to risks as they occur.
4. You’ve built platforms at Flipkart, Ola, and Udaan. What key lessons have you learned about building systems that can scale reliably?
Honesty, having spent some good amount of time contributing towards the creation of scalable systems that worked well, the majority of my learnings has come from my exposure to situations where things were not working and have failed. For instance, although having sound principles to work from is important, the culture of dealing with failures should be equally considered. Teams that succeed in scaling systems are usually the ones who are transparent about what doesn't work, analyze the issue deeply to find out the root cause, and use incidents to make the system stronger.
As one of the things I've learned, simplicity is very important for any system, but complexity creeps in without being noticed. Therefore, every now and then it becomes crucial to pause for some time and make your system more efficient, reliable, and hardened. When dealing with scale issues, it is easy to take certain shortcuts and sacrifice efficiency. What you really need to do is remain objective and base your evaluations of the system based on metrics.
Finally, it must be stated that developer efficiency alone does not contribute to anything unless there is proper control. Without a system in place, quickness leads to fragility. In this regard, robust engineering teams make it effortless to do the right things and difficult to do the wrong things through powerful abstractions, testing, and observability that comes from day one. It should be noted that scalable systems aren’t built quickly; they become stronger consistently.
5. super.money has scaled quickly in a competitive market. What were the most important technology and product decisions behind this growth?
Our approach to building the tech that powers super.money has been anchored in a simple but consistent principle: speed with discipline. While moving fast is important, we’ve ensured that it is supported by strong investments in observability and developer tooling, which allow us to scale without compromising system integrity. In fintech, performance is not just a backend metric, it directly shapes user trust, as every millisecond of latency and every point of failure impacts the experience. Alongside this, we’ve remained deeply focused on simplicity. Every feature we build is evaluated against a single question: does this genuinely reduce friction and cognitive load for the user? As a result, our growth has not come from noise, but from consistency - in performance, in communication, and in delivering a product that users can rely on every day.
6. In fast-growing fintech companies, how do you balance speed of innovation with system stability?
In fast-growing environments, speed and stability are often viewed as competing priorities. But in reality, they depend on the same underlying foundations. At super.money, we focus on building reusable platform layers and strong guardrails that allow teams to innovate without introducing unnecessary risk. Low-friction release cycles, supported by feature flags, incremental rollouts, and automated testing, ensure that new capabilities can be deployed safely and efficiently. On the other hand, performance testing and stress testing are carried out to ensure that further innovations do not compromise the reliability of the system. Thus, with an understandable and organised system, innovation can become both efficient and sustainable.
7. Looking ahead, which technologies, like AI, data, or embedded finance, will have the biggest impact on digital payments in India?
As far as the future is concerned, innovation within digital payments will not be dependent on any one particular technological innovation, but on how many different technologies can work collectively to make improvements for users. AI, for example, can play a very important role in this regard since it can help innovate around issues of credit and risk.
At the same time, data will act as the connective layer, powering deeper personalisation, improving reliability, and enabling platforms to design more meaningful and contextual financial journeys.
In parallel, embedded finance will continue to blur the lines between financial services and everyday experiences, making them more contextual and seamless.
Going forward we will see more sophisticated embedded credit products seamlessly integrated across commerce, travel, and beyond. As UPI continues to scale, the focus will also expand to solving for consistency and accessibility - including reliable performance in low-network environments, seamless experiences across devices, and intuitive interfaces for a wide spectrum of users. The infrastructure is already in place. The real differentiation will come down to how effectively platforms leverage behavioural data and these emerging technologies to build products that genuinely improve users’ financial lives.
