OpenAI has partnered with Pine Labs, one of India’s largest merchant payment processors, to integrate its advanced reasoning models into the fintech company’s payments and commerce infrastructure.
Announced Thursday, the collaboration aims to automate settlement, reconciliation, invoicing, and payments orchestration workflows—starting with business-to-business use cases—while positioning India as a key testing ground for AI-led commerce in regulated environments.
According to TechCrunch, the partnership leverages OpenAI’s APIs to embed reasoning and agentic capabilities directly into Pine Labs’ stack.
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Pine Labs CEO B. Amrish Rau told TechCrunch the integration builds on existing internal AI use, where the company has already reduced daily settlement clearance times from hours to minutes by automating manual checks across multiple banks.
“The bigger impact of all of this is really efficiency improvement, especially in B2B,” Rau said. “If you look at invoicing and settlement, those are workflows where agents can actually drive the process end to end, and that’s where adoption can happen faster.”
Focus on B2B and Regulated Workflows
The rollout prioritizes enterprise-grade automation in high-volume, repetitive financial tasks. Initial use cases include:
- Invoice processing and reconciliation
- Settlement orchestration across banks
- Compliance and fraud monitoring
- Payments routing and exception handling
Rau emphasized that full agent-initiated payments will likely advance faster in overseas markets (the Middle East, Southeast Asia) where regulations permit more autonomous transaction flows. In India, adoption will remain “AI-assisted” due to stricter payment authorization rules, with human oversight required for final execution.
Pine Labs is already prototyping agent-driven payments in select international markets. The partnership is non-exclusive and involves no revenue sharing. Rau compared it to OpenAI’s U.S. collaboration with Stripe, noting Pine Labs remains open to working with other AI providers (including Anthropic’s Claude, which it has used in earlier bill-payment experiments via its Setu unit).
Security, Compliance, and Data Protection Emphasis
Pine Labs is layering additional security and compliance controls around AI workflows to protect sensitive merchant and consumer transaction data. Rau stressed that all integrations prioritize data privacy, auditability, and regulatory adherence—critical in India’s tightly regulated payments ecosystem under RBI guidelines.
The deal aligns with OpenAI’s aggressive India expansion strategy. Earlier this week, OpenAI partnered with leading Indian engineering, medical, and design institutions to integrate AI tools into higher education, tapping India’s massive developer base and 1 billion+ internet users. India is now one of OpenAI’s fastest-growing markets, with significant enterprise traction among banks, insurers, retailers, and government entities.
For Pine Labs, the collaboration extends its role from a payments processor to a broader commerce platform. The company works with over 980,000 merchants, 716 consumer brands, and 177 financial institutions across 20 countries, having processed more than 6 billion transactions valued at over ?11.4 trillion (~$126 billion) as per its 2025 prospectus.
Embedding AI agents aims to increase merchant stickiness, transaction volumes, and incremental revenue streams.
The partnership highlights the accelerating shift toward agentic AI in enterprise fintech:
- Automating multi-step, rule-based workflows (settlements, invoicing, reconciliation)
- Reducing manual intervention in high-volume financial operations
- Improving speed, accuracy, and cost efficiency in regulated environments
It also reflects India’s growing role as a global AI deployment and innovation hub. With massive developer talent, favorable regulatory sandboxes (e.g., RBI’s Payments Vision 2025), and government initiatives like IndiaAI Mission, India is emerging as a preferred market for testing enterprise-grade AI agents in payments and commerce.
Competitors are moving in parallel:
- PhonePe, Paytm, and Razorpay have launched AI-driven fraud detection, customer support chatbots, and reconciliation tools.
- Global players like Stripe (with OpenAI) and Adyen are rolling out AI-powered payments intelligence.
- Domestic banks (HDFC, ICICI, Axis) are deploying internal AI agents for compliance and operations.
The collaboration arrives as India hosts the AI Impact Summit (February 16–20, 2026), where OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and others are showcasing capabilities alongside Indian startups focused on large-scale deployment in finance, healthcare, and education.
Rau sees B2B workflows as the fastest path to adoption, with consumer-facing agentic payments likely to follow more gradually due to regulatory caution. The partnership’s success will depend much on execution: delivering measurable ROI (cost savings, faster reconciliation, reduced errors), maintaining compliance in regulated sectors, and scaling agent reliability across diverse merchant use cases.
The deal deepens OpenAI’s footprint in India’s payments ecosystem—one of the world’s largest and fastest-digitizing markets—while providing real-world validation of Claude’s reasoning capabilities in high-stakes financial operations. For Pine Labs, it strengthens its competitive positioning against both domestic fintechs and global payments giants.
Partnerships like OpenAI–Pine Labs illustrate how frontier models are being embedded into mission-critical enterprise workflows—starting with B2B efficiency gains and potentially expanding to autonomous commerce in the years ahead.