Settlement Becomes Strategy
MUMBAI — The payments conversation is shifting from authorization to access. At the Global Fintech Festival 2026, PRISM founder Ritesh Agarwal and Adyen Chief Commercial Officer Roelant Prins framed a problem that is becoming increasingly central for merchants: once a payment is accepted, what happens before the cash is actually available?
For years, the industry's headline metric was acceptance rate. Merchants, payment firms and banks focused on reducing declines, improving uptime and smoothing checkout experiences. But for many businesses, especially small hotel owners and other cash-sensitive operators, the more immediate question is no longer whether a customer can pay. It is how quickly that payment turns into usable liquidity for payroll, inventory, utilities and day-to-day operations.
That distinction matters because the economics of small and mid-sized merchants are often tight. A hotel may fill rooms today but still need funds tomorrow to pay staff, settle vendor bills or manage seasonal demand. When settlement is delayed, the merchant effectively finances the payment chain. In that sense, faster money movement is not a convenience feature; it is a balance-sheet issue.
The discussion at GFF 2026 reflects a broader industry recalibration. As digital payments become more reliable and more ubiquitous, the competitive edge is moving downstream into treasury, reconciliation and working-capital management. Payment acceptance is increasingly table stakes. The next battleground is what merchants can do in the meantime.
AI Moves Back Office
Prins and Agarwal also pointed to another structural shift: artificial intelligence is changing the back office faster than it is changing how people buy. That is a notable reversal from the consumer-facing hype cycle that has dominated fintech for several years.
In practice, AI is already proving more useful in operations than in the checkout flow. It can help reconcile transactions, flag anomalies, route support tickets, automate reporting and reduce manual work in finance teams. For merchants, that means faster exception handling and lower operating friction long before AI fundamentally alters the act of payment itself.
This is especially relevant in sectors such as hospitality, where transaction volumes can be high and operational complexity is constant. A hotel owner may not need a radically different way for guests to pay, but may urgently need better tools to understand when money will arrive, how it will be reconciled and how it can be deployed across the business. AI, in that context, is less about novelty than about speed, accuracy and control.
The implication for banks and payment providers is clear: the value proposition is expanding beyond rails and checkout interfaces. Merchants increasingly expect embedded intelligence, faster settlement visibility and operational automation as part of the payment stack itself.
Merchant Pain Points Rise
India's digital payments ecosystem has made extraordinary progress in acceptance, interoperability and consumer adoption. Yet the merchant experience remains uneven, particularly for smaller businesses that lack sophisticated treasury systems. Large enterprises can often absorb settlement delays through credit lines or internal cash buffers. Smaller merchants cannot.
That is why the conversation at GFF 2026 is significant. It signals a maturing market in which the next wave of innovation will be judged not only by transaction success rates, but by how effectively it supports merchant cash flow. Faster settlement, better forecasting and automated back-office workflows are becoming part of the same competitive equation.
For fintechs, this creates an opportunity to move up the value chain. For banks, it raises the bar on merchant services. And for merchants, it reframes payments as a working-capital tool rather than a simple acceptance utility.
The message from the festival was blunt: in the new payments economy, getting paid is only the first step. What matters next is how quickly that money can be put to work.