
India's Digital Payment Revolution: Why Security Must Evolve Now, ETCISO
Additionally, operational risks are increasing. A five-hour UPI disruption in April 2025 caused ripple effects across consumers, businesses, and institutions. Consumer expectations have evolved to requiring 24x7 availability and uncompromised security. Yet incidents of frauds are rising sharply. According to the Ministry of Finance, an 85% rise in domestic UPI fraud was reported in fiscal year 23-24, with losses surpassing INR 1,000 crore. Cyber frauds are no longer limited to stolen credentials or phishing attempts. Threat actors are exploiting third-party APIs, automating attacks, and deploying synthetic identities. As instant payments and cloud-driven platforms grow, so does the complexity of securing them.
Advt
Advt
India's payment infrastructure must now evolve to absorb disruption, ensure continuity, and protect trust. This requires embedding cyber resilience across every layer of the ecosystem, including architecture, applications, and transactions. Resilience must be built for continuity under pressure and not just to avoid risk. It involves anticipating disruptions, enabling real-time response, and sustaining secure operations. Banks, fintechs, and regulators must align on a security-first strategy to maintain confidence and support long-term digital growth.Maintaining uptime and steady availability has become a critical factor for building trust in India's digital finance systems with even brief disruptions affecting user confidence and business continuity. Consumers view the ecosystem as a single entity, without differentiating between a payment app, a bank server, or a cloud provider. As financial institutions tend to be at the forefront here, they need to ensure that resilience must be built across the entire technology stack to deliver consistent performance, high uptime, and uninterrupted service across all transaction volumes and locations.Building a resilient infrastructure requires a design approach that anticipates failure and ensures uninterrupted performance. This involves deploying workloads across multi-cloud environments to eliminate single points of failure and establishing automated failover mechanisms with geo-redundancy that helps in shifting operations seamlessly during disruptions. Additionally, real-time monitoring, supported by AIOps tools, plays a critical role in detecting anomalies early and triggering swift, automated responses to maintain continuity. Together, these capabilities create a robust foundation for operational resilience and long-term trust in digital systems.While resilient infrastructure ensures uptime, it must be complemented by an intelligent and adaptive threat detection system. Cyber threats are advancing at machine speed, outpacing traditional rule-based defenses. AI now plays a central role in cyber resilience, enabling real-time analysis, anomaly detection, and predictive response.Its ability to learn from live patterns and process vast volumes of transactional data brings precision and speed to security operations. GenAI extends this capability by uncovering early indicators of compromise through historical log analysis, enabling preventive action before breaches occur.This dual-use nature of AI, as both a defense tool and a potential threat, makes governance critical. A responsible AI strategy must include zero-trust frameworks, least-privilege access, and clear accountability to ensure secure deployment while preserving stakeholder trust.Thus, AI's true value lies in how seamlessly it integrates into existing workflows. Embedded into a broader resilience strategy, it sharpens detection, accelerates decision-making, and enables real-time mitigation, reinforcing control, compliance, and long-term digital trust.India's digital payments growth trajectory remains strong, but its long-term success will depend less on transaction speed and more on the ability to secure, sustain, and scale operations with confidence. The financial ecosystem must embed cyber resilience as a design principle, not an afterthought. This requires coordinated action across banks, fintechs, regulators, and technology providers.India is well positioned to lead the next phase of global payments innovation. The digital foundation is in place. The priority now is to build resilience in India's digital payment architecture and elevate security from a compliance requirement to a strategic enabler of growth, while leverage AI for driving faster, smarter cyber decisions—boosting availability, resilience, security operations, continuous control monitoring, and data security posture management.
By ,
ETCISO
Join the community of 2M+ industry professionals. Subscribe to Newsletter to get latest insights & analysis in your inbox.
All about ETCISO industry right on your smartphone! Download the ETCISO App and get the Realtime updates and Save your favourite articles.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Deccan Herald
an hour ago
- Deccan Herald
Karnataka sets up helpline after bribe complaints
The Commercial Taxes department has launched a dedicated helpline to combat corruption and ensure strict action against erring staff, to address complaints regarding bribe demands by officials concerning UPI-related matters. The Additional Commissioner of Commercial Taxes said the department has received information through media and other sources that certain officers and staff have allegedly demanded bribes in connection with UPI-related issues. It has also come to the attention of the department that a few middlemen are demanding money from traders under the pretext of offering assistance in such matters, the department. Taking serious note of the issue, the department reiterated its zero-tolerance policy towards corruption and assured that appropriate action would be taken against officials or staff found guilty. Traders have been urged to report any such incidents immediately by contacting the department's helpline at 18004256300, which is available from 8.00 am to 8.00 pm on working days


The Hindu
an hour ago
- The Hindu
Bakeries, condiments and small enterprises protest against GST notices on July 24
The Karnataka State Association of Bakeries, Condiments and Small Enterprises has organised a protest rally at Freedom Park on Thursday, to protest the 'unscientific' Goods and Services Tax (GST) notices issued by the Commercial Taxes Department to small-scale traders. D.B. Pratap Shetty, president of the association, expressed concern over the GST notices to small-scale businesses like condiments stores, bakeries, milk sellers, vegetable vendors, and others, and said these notices had created a sense of fear among traders. These notices have been issued based on transactions in their UPI payment gateway linked accounts. 'Most of our transactions — over 95% — are through digital payments,' Mr. Shetty said, and warned that if their issues are not sorted out, they will launch a State-wide protest against the UPI payment system. 'We will begin a campaign to break UPI scanners as a mark of protest,' he warned. He alleged that traders with annual transactions between ₹20 lakh and ₹40 lakh are being served notices, which goes against the standard GST norms. While demanding the withdrawal of such notices, the association has demanded that the government allow traders with turnover exceeding ₹40 lakh per year to settle their dues under the presumptive tax scheme by paying a flat 1% tax based on available records.


Time of India
an hour ago
- Time of India
ZEEL's ad revenue declines by 16.7% in Q1FY26
Zee Entertainment Enterprises ( ZEEL ) has reported a 21.19 per cent year-on-year (YoY) increase in its net profit for the quarter ending June 30, 2025, reaching INR 143.7 crore, up from INR 118.1 crore in the corresponding period last year. Despite the surge in profit, the media conglomerate experienced a significant decline across key revenue streams. Advertising revenue fell by 16.77 per cent to INR 758.5 crore for the quarter, compared to INR 911.3 crore in the quarter ended June 30, 2024. The company attributed that domestic advertising revenue declined for the quarter due to extended sports calendar, and slowdown in FMCG spending . 'The domestic advertising environment continues to be a soft, healthy monsoon and festive pick-up augurs well for the near future,' said the company. Subscription revenue also saw a marginal dip of 0.56 per cent, settling at INR 981.7 crore against INR 987.2 crore in the prior year. Other sales and services witnessed a substantial decline of 63.53 per cent, decreasing to INR 84.6 crore from INR 232 crore. 'Increase in digital subscription revenue was offset by decline in linear subscription revenue due to fall in PayTV subscribers. And other sales and services declined due to lower theatrical and syndication revenue,' informed Zee. Consequently, total income for the quarter declined by 13.94 per cent, standing at INR 1,849.8 crore compared to INR 2,149.5 crore a year ago. The company's operational expenses declined by 17.5 per cent to INR 971.0 crore from INR 1,177 crore. Employee benefits expense also saw a modest decline of 2.52 per cent, amounting to INR 220.1 crore against INR 225.8 crore. Furthermore, advertisement and publicity expenses decreased by 4.97 per cent, from INR 289.6 crore to INR 275.2 crore.