Pine Labs has announced a collaboration with OpenAI to integrate OpenAI's APIs directly into its payment infrastructure, with the aim of enabling what the India-based company describes as 'agentic commerce'. The partnership represents a move away from rule-based transaction processing towards systems capable of autonomous decision-making within defined compliance frameworks.
The announcement positions Pine Labs as an early adopter of agentic AI within a market that processed more than 180 billion digital payment transactions annually, according to figures cited by the company. India's fintech sector is projected to reach a USD 1.5 trillion valuation in 2026, driven in part by the country's Unified Payments Interface (UPI) infrastructure.
From deterministic processing to probabilistic reasoning
The technical premise of the collaboration centres on replacing the conventional 'if/then' logic that has underpinned fintech systems with what Pine Labs calls a 'reasoning layer', an AI-driven component capable of interpreting context, weighing options, and executing financial workflows autonomously. A company official described the shift as moving Pine Labs' infrastructure from a passive participant in transactions to an active system that can optimise the workflows behind them.
Under this architecture, AI agents would be capable of handling complex tasks such as negotiating supplier terms, optimising cross-border settlement cycles, and managing recurring payment obligations. OpenAI's models would supply the decision-making layer, while Pine Labs' existing payment rails function as the execution infrastructure for regulated financial outcomes.
Security, compliance, and third-party access
Pine Labs has indicated that all AI-driven workflows will operate within its enterprise security and compliance framework, incorporating data isolation, encryption, and human oversight mechanisms where required. The company states that the architecture is designed to meet financial regulatory standards applicable to high-stakes environments.
Beyond internal deployment, Pine Labs intends to open this agentic stack to its developer ecosystem, allowing third-party developers to build AI-native fintech applications on the platform. The company cited the UPI Reserve Pay feature as part of the underlying infrastructure that could support conversational commerce at scale, enabling users to delegate financial decisions to intelligent agents within a single dialogue rather than conducting searches and initiating payments separately.
Pine Labs operates in India and several international markets including Malaysia, the UAE, Singapore, Australia, the US, and Africa. Its product portfolio spans online payment processing, affordability solutions for merchants, fintech infrastructure for financial institutions, and issuing services covering prepaid instruments, gift cards, and credit products across multiple regions.
