Razorpay, Cashfree stop direct integrations with Juspay; Pine Labs to continue partnership

The intensifying competition in digital payments has split the merchant payment industry. The symbiotic relationship between payment aggregators Razorpay and Cashfree and payment orchestrating platforms like Juspay seem to have been disrupted as both get into each other’s domain with competing products.Two major payment aggregators Razorpay and Cashfree have said that they are pausing third-party integrations with the SoftBank-backed Juspay. This move comes after PhonePe said it cut ties with Juspay in December last year.

Pine Labs, which offers both offline and online merchant payment services, said it will continue to work with other orchestration services.

“In the world of technology, open architecture and collaboration are extremely important. At Pine Labs, we will continue to foster this and our online platform will continue to partner with other orchestration platforms to provide the best experience for merchants and consumers,” said Amrish Rau, chief executive officer, Pine Labs, which processes around 3 billion online transactions monthly.

Razorpay and Cashfree have said they will stop working with third-party routing platforms.

“Going forward, we will be pausing all integrations through third-party routing platforms. We will offer payment gateway services through our own, direct integrations to our customers,” a Razorpay spokesperson said responding to ET’s queries.

Similarly, a Cashfree spokesperson said that the Bengaluru-based firm plans to transition away from integrations via third-party routers and orchestrators.“By offering direct integration, we can accelerate the delivery of features and offer superior support and merchant experience,” the spokesperson added.

Razorpay and Cashfree’s move was first reported by the news portal The Head and Tale.

As the online merchant ecosystem has grown, digital payment platforms have registered a rise in the volume of transactions. This has resulted in a sharp increase in payment failures, which led to the emergence of payment players like Juspay. These offer services through which a merchant can route transactions to the right payment aggregator based on their higher success rate at that time.

However, Razorpay eventually built its own orchestration platform named Optimiser and so did Paytm, while Juspay secured an online payment aggregator licence from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) last year. All of these now compete against each other.

On December 14, 2023, ET had reported about Juspay building a full-stack payment system to process payments for the Open Credit Enablement Network (OCEN), and other business payment use cases. Juspay cofounder Sheetal Lalwani had told ET that he would not directly compete with other payment aggregators.