How India's fintechs prepare for system contingencies

With NPCI processing nearly 19 to 20 billion transactions every month, valued at over Rs 24-25 lakh crores, and India accounting for nearly half of the real–time payments happening around the world, fintech companies in India are a large part of this boom story. At the Global Fintech Fest 2025, Sameer Nigam, CEO of PhonePe and Razorpay co-founder, Shashank Kumar, both laid out how tech teams prepare for the worst case.  

While mistakes are a part of businesses, making sure the same doesn't occur twice and learning from a mistake is all-important, according to Sameer. “You can make a thousand mistakes once, but you can't make the same mistake twice. I think more importantly, it's about how quickly you can isolate where the issue is,” he adds.  

Even though building capabilities that are transparent and that can help in identifying the problem quickly can help in stemming the problem early, for tech teams, challenges are a moving target. “Our tech team does an exceptionally good job of trying to get more real-time alerting in, and make sure that any part of the system starts overheating, you know, right before it's about to explode,” Nigam adds.  

Apart from early alerts for possible system disruptions, Kumar sees the ability to respond to a crisis quickly and tracking of the problem as also being critical. “We have a team that staffs 24/7 for monitoring the systems. Even at 3 am, if something goes wrong, they will call everyone to ensure that those people get up and get on the call to resolve it,” he says. And when things do go wrong, communication plays a vital role in mitigating frustration are various touch points “So as much as like you know you from a try to prevent like things from going down when that happens, I think you need to be very well prepared on responding and recovering quickly, communicating very well, so that it minimizes frustration for us, for the end user,” Kumar said.   

With UPI now making a select foray globally, Sameer sees digital benefit transfer as the next big opportunity to showcase its platform globally. Especially in developing nations, India’s DPI infrastructure stack could lead as the best case on government welfare schemes, meeting beneficiaries on a tech layer.