With digital payments crossing 180 billion transactions annually and fintech valuation projected at $1.5 trillion, Pine Labs partners with OpenAI to embed advanced AI reasoning into commerce infrastructure, enabling autonomous, secure, and scalable financial workflows.
India has cemented its position as a global fintech powerhouse, with annual digital payment volumes surpassing 180 billion transactions and the sector expected to touch a $1.5 trillion valuation this year. Against this backdrop, Pine Labs has announced a strategic collaboration with OpenAI aimed at redefining how commerce systems operate.
The partnership will see OpenAI’s APIs integrated directly into Pine Labs’ AI-native infrastructure, marking a shift toward what the company calls “Agentic Commerce” — a model where financial systems move beyond simply recording transactions to autonomously optimizing workflows behind them.
The shift from passive systems to active intelligence
“For decades, commerce has been built on passive systems that simply follow instructions,” said B Amrish Rau, CEO, Pine Labs. “At Pine Labs, we are moving beyond that era to build an active, intelligent layer for business. Our work with OpenAI ensures that our infrastructure is no longer just a participant in a trade, but a driver of efficiency and growth. We are building the first agentic stack for the next generation of the global economy.”
The collaboration represents a transition from traditional deterministic “if/then” fintech logic to systems capable of contextual reasoning. By embedding OpenAI’s intelligence into its core stack, Pine Labs is developing what it describes as a “Reasoning Layer” for commerce — infrastructure that can interpret context, assess probabilities, and execute decisions within secure and compliant financial frameworks.
Engineering actionable AI for financial workflows
“The next phase of AI is about moving from information to action,” said Oliver Jay, Managing Director, International, OpenAI. “By combining our advanced reasoning capabilities with Pine Labs’ deep merchant infrastructure, we are helping to create a powerful engine for innovation that turns complex financial workflows into seamless, agentic experiences at scale.”
The collaboration also builds on India’s advanced digital public infrastructure, including platforms such as Unified Payments Interface and innovations like UPI Reserve Pay. Together, these rails enable conversational interfaces to evolve into fully executable financial environments, where users can delegate complete financial lifecycles within a single interaction.
Under the new architecture, AI agents could autonomously negotiate supplier terms, optimize cross-border settlements, or manage recurring bill payments — all within predefined guardrails. OpenAI delivers the decision-making intelligence, while payment rails ensure regulated and final execution.
Pine Labs emphasized that all AI-driven workflows will operate within its enterprise-grade security and compliance framework, featuring strict data isolation, encryption protocols, and human oversight where required.
Beyond internal deployment, the company plans to open its agentic stack to developers, enabling third-party innovators to build AI-native fintech applications. By doing so, Pine Labs aims to equip merchants — from small businesses to global enterprises — with infrastructure designed to think, reason, and scale in an increasingly autonomous digital economy.
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