Open by Design
Juspay's Ishan Sharma used the Global Fintech Fest 2026 stage to make a broader point about where Indian payments infrastructure is headed: openness, not closed ecosystems, will determine which platforms endure. Speaking to The Economic Times, Sharma framed the company's 12-year journey as a long exercise in solving for scale, reliability and interoperability in a market that processes transactions for more than a billion people.
His central message was that payments in India have already moved far beyond the basic question of digitisation. The real challenge now is to build systems that can handle population-scale volumes while remaining flexible enough to support new merchant models, new checkout experiences and emerging forms of commerce. That, he suggested, is where the next phase of fintech competition will be won.
Sharma's emphasis on openness reflects a wider shift in Indian financial technology. The country's digital public infrastructure has created a market in which speed, cost and access are no longer enough on their own. Infrastructure providers must now think about programmability, portability and the ability to plug into multiple ecosystems without friction. In that context, Juspay's positioning is not simply as a payments company, but as a layer of infrastructure designed to sit across rails and use cases.
Agentic Commerce Ahead
A major theme in Sharma's remarks was the rise of agentic commerce, a concept that could redefine how consumers and businesses interact with payment systems. In this model, software agents may increasingly initiate, manage and complete transactions on behalf of users, changing the role of the checkout page and shifting the emphasis from manual payment flows to intelligent, contextual execution.
For payments companies, that evolution carries both opportunity and risk. Agentic commerce could reduce friction, improve conversion and create entirely new transaction journeys. But it also raises difficult questions around authentication, consent, fraud controls and the architecture needed to support machine-led purchasing at scale. Sharma's comments indicate that Juspay sees this as a structural change rather than a passing trend.
The implications are significant for merchants as well. If commerce becomes more agent-driven, then the infrastructure behind payments must be able to support dynamic pricing, recurring authorisations, contextual approvals and cross-platform continuity. That requires systems that are not only secure, but also highly adaptable. Sharma's insistence on openness suggests that closed, rigid payment stacks may struggle to keep pace.
India Must Think Global
Sharma also made a pointed case for Indian fintechs to aim higher than the domestic market alone. He argued that companies built in India should aspire to serve developed markets, where expectations around compliance, product sophistication and user experience are often more demanding. The message was clear: if Indian firms can solve for one of the world's most complex and high-volume payment environments, they should be able to compete internationally.
That view reflects a growing confidence within India's fintech sector. Over the past decade, the country has become a laboratory for digital payments innovation, with scale, low transaction values and high-frequency usage creating a uniquely demanding environment. Companies that survive in this setting often develop capabilities that are highly exportable, from orchestration and checkout optimisation to fraud management and payment reliability.
Still, Sharma's remarks also underline the gap between domestic success and global expansion. Winning in developed markets requires more than technical competence. It demands regulatory readiness, enterprise-grade support, localisation and the ability to integrate with legacy systems as well as modern payment stacks. For Indian fintechs, the next frontier is not just proving that they can build at home, but that they can package those capabilities for international customers.
The broader significance of Sharma's comments lies in how they connect three trends that are converging across fintech: the maturation of India's payments infrastructure, the emergence of AI-driven commerce and the push for global competitiveness. Juspay's thesis, as Sharma presented it, is that the future belongs to open systems built for scale and designed to evolve with the market rather than resist it.
For India's fintech sector, that is both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is to keep pace with a rapidly changing transaction landscape. The opportunity is to turn the country's hard-won infrastructure lessons into products that can travel well beyond its borders.