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Episode 115 · Fintech · 51 min

Push the behaviour, don't wait for it

Cashfree's founding read on Indian payments was that the incumbents were order-takers — good at distribution, content to comply with behaviour change rather than cause it. Akash Sinha's counter is to build the flow before anyone asks for it: card pre-authorisation for a travel industry losing more than 40% of tickets to same-day cancellations, insurance claims settled in seconds. Nine years in, the test is whether a ten-person shop can offer the checkout a fifty-engineer e-commerce team used to build.

Payments & fintech Product strategy Consumer India

Akash Sinha

Co-founder & CEO, Cashfree Payments · with Vishal Krishna

50:36

Said in this episode

▶ 13:33

40%+

Travel tickets cancelled the same day

The rate travel partners reported for same-day cancellations, against refunds that took 7 to 10 days — the problem card pre-authorisation was built to remove.

▶ 8:44

50+

Engineers a 2015 e-commerce firm put on payments alone

What it once cost to surface bank downtime, card-EMI offers and every popular payment method; Cashfree's claim is that a hosted checkout page now closes that gap to almost zero.

▶ 29:16

50–55 mn

Businesses in India, most of them still offline

Sinha's own count against the 50 million consultants quote, alongside his estimate that retail remains 94-95% offline — a figure stated in conversation, not sourced.

▶ 20:03

10s vs 50s

The checkout window inside an in-app browser

A 50-second purchase flow inside an Instagram in-app browser loses the sale and wastes the ad spend that bought the intent; ten seconds keeps both.

▶ 24:46

₹50,000 vs ₹7,000

Metro card daily limit against a tier-2 credit limit

Illustrative figures Sinha uses for why EMI and split payments decide conversion beyond the metros — not presented as survey data.

▶ 42:08

90%+

Fraudulent transactions RiskShield claims to catch

Cashfree's own figure for a paid fraud product launched late in the previous year and in market roughly six months, still running free trials at the time of recording.

The brief

The argument in sixty seconds

Sinha's claim is that India's payment companies of the early 2010s were service businesses wearing product clothes: excellent at distribution, quick to comply when customer behaviour shifted, never the ones to shift it. Cashfree started in 2015 out of 300-odd merchant conversations in two months, and its industry-firsts read as a single argument — build the flow before the market asks for it. Travel partners were losing more than 40% of tickets to same-day cancellations while refunds took seven to ten days, so Cashfree blocked money on the card instead of debiting it; instant refunds, instant refunds on cash-on-delivery returns, and second-scale insurance payouts followed the same habit of designing for the customer's customer. The connective claim is that payments is infrastructure — 'it's like roads' — so the value lies in widening the road rather than personalising it: a hosted checkout page that hands a ten-person merchant the downtime alerts, bank offers and payment methods only a fifty-engineer e-commerce team could once afford; embedded payments that drop collection and disbursal inside other people's software; and intelligence pushed to the edges, where a fraud product flags the ₹2 lakh payout from a business that averages ₹40,000. The stakes sit in the numbers he refuses to romanticise — 50 to 55 million Indian businesses, retail still 94–95% offline, metros already saturated, the next buyer holding a ₹7,000 credit limit against a metro card's ₹50,000 daily cap. Growth, he insists, does not come from moving a shoe shop online. It comes from selling in both places at once.

Worth your time if you are

Founders whose checkout quietly leaks paid traffic

Product engineers who have never met a customer

Insurance and lending teams still disbursing by hand

Growth leads sizing tier-2 and tier-3 India

SaaS builders weighing embedded payments

Episode map

Where the conversation travels

Every block is a chapter, coloured by what it's about. Click any of it to jump straight to that minute on YouTube.

Payments & fintechProduct strategyConsumer IndiaSaaS & enterpriseFounder journeyHiring & talent

01Cold open: Amazon, then 300 businesses 0:00 Vishal frames a decade of Indian payments before Sinha traces the route from Amazon software engineer — where business metrics, not just scalable systems, became the education — to meeting over 300 businesses in two months and concluding that the incumbents distributed well but never pushed the market. 02Segment first, then ask three questions 3:46 His discipline for staying customer-true: define the market as anyone selling over the internet, classify it by company size and by whether the buyers sit in metros or smaller towns, then ask daily whether the product is accessible, usable and actually solving the problem. 03What 2015 lacked and 2024 still owes 5:45 Two problems defined 2015 — too few payment solutions for a market of small, new internet businesses, and solutions that lagged global peers on experience and success rate — and Sinha argues the remaining debt is making first-class payments available to merchants with no payment engineers at all. 04Fifty engineers, or one checkout page 8:29 In 2015-16 only a large e-commerce company with 50-plus engineers on payments could flag that a bank was down, source card-EMI offers or carry every popular method; Cashfree's hosted checkout absorbs all of it behind an API so the gap is now, in his words, almost zero. 05Grow the pie, then make it safe 10:14 On regulation and the RBI back-and-forth: payments has become an essential service, so someone has to keep enlarging the ecosystem while simultaneously making it safer, more accessible and — his phrase — less surprising, or the growth reverses. 06The cyber cafe nobody needs 11:45 Supply and demand compound each other: UPI, smartphones and WhatsApp-grade digital literacy have retired the cyber-cafe intermediary who once booked your ticket, and the same literacy now pushes people from buying online to selling online. 07Pre-auth, instant refunds, instant claims 13:17 Three industry-firsts born from thinking about the customer's customer — blocking rather than debiting a card when travel partners reported 40%-plus same-day cancellations, instant refunds including on cash-on-delivery returns, and insurance payouts dispersed to thousands of claimants in seconds. 08Insurance is three problems, not one 15:33 Insurers arrive with recurring premium collection, claim processing and payee verification; Cashfree's bank-account verification service confirms the account and the name in seconds, turning a claim that generated thousands of angry phone calls into a journey measured in minutes. 09Ten seconds inside the Instagram browser 18:04 Accessibility is conversion: a 50-second checkout inside an in-app browser loses both the sale and the ad spend that bought the intent, while a 10-second one keeps both — the logic behind the D2C checkout company Cashfree acquired last year. 10Empathy as an engineering skill 20:49 Either be a user of your own product or do the research to imagine one — then a survey of who has actually linked payments to buying intent: e-commerce, hyperlocal and travel have; offline automotive and healthcare have barely started. 11Tier-2 limits and the B2B buyer 24:01 Metro e-commerce is saturated, so growth depends on shoppers whose card limits are a fraction of a metro cap and who need EMI or split payments — while wholesalers arriving online pay by corporate card, net banking or B2B buy-now-pay-later rather than debit and UPI. 12Fifty million businesses, mostly offline 28:44 Sinha puts India's business count above 50-55 million with retail still 94-95% offline, argues the internet adds new value rather than cannibalising the old, and positions embedded payments — an SDK inside someone else's ERP — alongside a Middle East expansion aimed at markets digitising the way India did. 13Two years of selling, then delegation 33:15 Both founders sold for more than two years and met over a thousand customers because no founder can delegate a function they have never done; the ego of predictable engineering had to give way to a job with no blueprint, and leaders arrived function by function — sales, then finance, then product. 14Two kinds of engineers 38:09 Against a war for talent among two million graduating engineers, Sinha wants the mix of technology-obsessed and problem-obsessed — and notes engineers returning from the US market because building for people whose lives you can picture is more gratifying. 15RiskShield and the Sunday payout 41:10 Payments is infrastructure and roads need no personalisation, so intelligence goes to the auxiliary layers — support queries, fraud, abuse — where RiskShield claims to catch over 90% of fraudulent transactions by noticing a ₹2 lakh payout from a ₹40,000-average business, or a disbursal on a day the business never disburses. 16Fundamentals, cloud bills, Kane and Abel 43:38 Advice to students to master a first language deeply before jumping to intelligence, a warning that businesses without tech insight can overpay five times for infrastructure and find out fifteen years late, and a close on fiction, Jeffrey Archer and doing what you are best at.

Takeaways

Ideas to carry out of this hour

The incumbent's sin was waiting to be asked

Sinha's read on Indian payments in 2015 was not that the players were bad — they had built products and were good at distributing them — but that they stopped there, comfortable with the status quo and quick to comply whenever behaviour shifted, never the ones to cause the shift. That, he argues, is a service-industry posture: take the requirement, go away, build it. A product company reads customer and market insight out of data that isn't neatly structured and ships the right flow before anyone has asked for it.

▶ 2:35 ▶ 2:49 ▶ 3:18

Serving the existing pie is only half the job

The stated goal is not a larger share of today's digital payment volume but a larger volume. Every industry-first he lists — pre-authorisation, instant refunds, second-scale claim payouts — is justified as something that makes an end customer more willing to transact digitally next time. Behaviour change, in his telling, is never forced: there is already an expectation in the market, and what people receive sits below it, so you build to meet or beat the expectation and frequency follows.

▶ 15:05 ▶ 15:18 ▶ 15:47

Pre-authorisation was designed against a refund cycle, not a card

Travel partners told Cashfree that more than 40% of tickets were cancelled on the same day they were booked, and refunds took seven to ten days to land. For a customer holding ₹10,000 in savings who has just booked a ₹5,000 flight, that is ten days of rationing everything else — a point the host confirms from his own years as a young journalist waiting a month for ticket money. The fix was to stop debiting: block the amount on the card, release the block on cancellation. Sinha says it was an India-first and is now becoming the norm.

▶ 13:33 ▶ 13:48 ▶ 14:18

The checkout page is where fifty engineers get commoditised

In 2015-16 the payment experience was a function of headcount: only a large e-commerce company with more than 50 engineers on payments alone could tell a shopper that a particular bank's cards were failing, source a 10% EMI offer from an issuer, or carry the buy-now-pay-later app someone had just downloaded. Cashfree's argument is that a hosted checkout page turns all of that into an API call, so a small merchant's payment experience is 'almost zero' different from big tech's — which pushes the competition back onto the product itself.

▶ 8:44 ▶ 9:28 ▶ 9:58

Attention is the conversion metric, and it is ten seconds long

When an Instagram ad opens a purchase page inside the app's own browser, a checkout that takes 50 seconds does double damage: you lose the sale, and you have already paid for the click that produced the intent. Ten seconds keeps both. Sinha frames the entire discipline as not wasting the window between intent and payment — the reason Cashfree bought a checkout company built for D2C merchants last year.

▶ 19:49 ▶ 20:03 ▶ 20:18

Metros are saturated; the next buyer has a ₹7,000 limit

The metro target — a customer buying three times a month — has largely been met, so the growth question moves to tier-2 and tier-3 shoppers whose cards carry credit limits a fraction of a metro card's daily cap. His illustrative pair: ₹50,000 a day in a metro against a ₹7,000 limit further out. That makes EMI and split payments a conversion mechanic rather than a finance feature, and the same logic extends to B2B, where wholesale buyers already transact on credit and now want it approved at the moment of purchase.

▶ 24:32 ▶ 24:46 ▶ 25:29

Payments is a road, so intelligence belongs at the edges

Asked how AI changes a commoditising business, Sinha declines the premise: payments is infrastructure, and infrastructure does not need personalisation — it needs enough road and enough traffic. What it does need is patrol. RiskShield, a paid product launched late last year and live for around six months, sits on the transaction stream and claims to catch over 90% of fraudulent transactions by learning a merchant's own shape: a business that averages ₹40,000 payouts suddenly sending ₹2 lakh, or disbursing on a Sunday it never disburses on.

▶ 41:10 ▶ 41:54 ▶ 42:38

Infrastructure cost is a founder problem, not a tech-team problem

As a business scales, a good part of its cost becomes the cost of the data it moves, and thin margins leave no room for infrastructure as a luxury. Sinha says he has seen companies paying five times what they should and not knowing it, because the people who own the P&L are detached from the people who spend the cloud budget and never ask the right questions. The bill arrives late — he suggests as much as fifteen years in — and by then the response is shutting things down. The knowledge is public; the missing ingredient is attention from day one.

▶ 46:07 ▶ 46:23 ▶ 46:37

The numbers, drawn

What the episode measures

Every figure below was said on air — timestamps included, caveats kept.

Conversation share

portion of the hour spent on each theme

Payments & fintech30%

Product strategy16%

Consumer India13%

SaaS & enterprise11%

Founder journey10%

Hiring & talent8%

Computed from the chapter map of this episode.

The window a checkout actually gets

seconds to complete

As stated in conversation about paying inside an Instagram in-app browser: at 50 seconds you lose the sale and the ad spend that bought the intent; at 10 seconds you keep both.▶ 20:03

The buyer beyond the metros

₹ limit on a card

Illustrative figures Sinha uses on air to explain why EMI and split payments decide tier-2 and tier-3 conversion; not measured data.▶ 24:46

Worth keeping

Lines that stay

They're not the first ones to push the behaviour change in the market. Once someone goes and asks them, they'll go and build it — but they never come up with the right flows themselves and take them to the market.

— Akash Sinha ▶ 2:49

Our job is not just to serve the existing pie. We also have a responsibility to increase the pie, by building the solutions which encourage more and more people to try digital.

— Akash Sinha ▶ 15:18

Payments is essentially infrastructure. It's like roads — as long as you're able to build enough roads, and as long as more traffic is flowing on them.

— Akash Sinha ▶ 41:10

Intelligence is a way to improve the quality of your service, rather than a service in itself.

— Akash Sinha ▶ 45:37

We all end up doing what we're second best at? I don't think so. I'm doing what I'm best at.

— Akash Sinha ▶ 50:08

Clips that travel

Short on time? Start here

Small merchants losing sales at the payment step

Fifty engineers, or one checkout page

The clearest statement of what Cashfree sells: bank downtime, card offers and every payment method, once a headcount problem, now an API call.

8:29 → 10:14 · 2 min ▶ Watch clip

Product managers designing around a refund cycle

The 40% cancellation that invented pre-auth

Three industry-firsts reverse-engineered from one insight — the customer's customer is rationing their month while your refund sits in transit.

13:17 → 15:33 · 2 min ▶ Watch clip

D2C operators paying for clicks that don't convert

Ten seconds inside the Instagram browser

Why checkout latency is an ad-spend problem, and how a payment company thinks about the gap between intent and money.

18:04 → 20:49 · 3 min ▶ Watch clip

Growth leads planning tier-2 and tier-3 expansion

The ₹7,000 limit past the metros

Saturated metros, smaller card limits, and the B2B wholesaler arriving online on corporate cards and buy-now-pay-later.

24:01 → 28:44 · 5 min ▶ Watch clip

Fintech and risk teams weighing AI's real use

Payments is a road; RiskShield is the patrol

The infrastructure argument against personalising payments, then a concrete fraud case: ₹2 lakh from a ₹40,000 business, blocked in real time.

40:55 → 43:38 · 3 min ▶ Watch clip

Glossary

The jargon, unpacked

Payment service provider (PSP)

The company that sits between a merchant and the banks, cards and UPI rails so money can be collected from customers or paid out to them — what Cashfree is.

Pre-authorisation

Blocking an amount on a customer's card instead of debiting it, so a cancellation simply releases the hold rather than triggering a seven-to-ten-day refund.

Payouts

Money moving out of a business to many recipients at once — insurance claims, refunds, vendor payments — as opposed to collections coming in.

Bank account verification

An API check that confirms an account number is valid and that the name on it matches the intended payee, run in seconds before a claim or refund is disbursed.

Embedded payments

Collection and disbursal dropped into somebody else's software through an SDK, so an ERP or vertical SaaS tool can transact without building a payments team or handling compliance itself.

B2B BNPL

Buy-now-pay-later for business purchases — credit approved at the moment of a wholesale transaction so the buyer can settle a large invoice in instalments instead of one shot.

Cash on delivery (COD)

Paying the courier at the door rather than online — still common in India, and the returns from it are what Cashfree's instant-refund product settles without a wait.

Drop-off

Shoppers who signalled intent to buy but abandoned before payment completed; the metric every extra second or step of checkout worsens.

Connections

If this resonated, go here next

EP 47 · Fintech

Full transcript

The whole conversation, searchable

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