AI & ML will be the focus of our tech evolution and innovation: Shantanu Preetam, CTO, PayU India

Excerpts:

What are PayU’s tech focus areas for 2021?

At PayU, our vision is to create a full-stack digital financial services platform to serve the financial needs of merchants, banks and consumers, through technology. In 2021, PayU is looking to heavily invest in serverless architecture paradigm and growth of PAAS (Platform as a Service). PayU is also wishes to increase its focus on hybrid and multi cloud adoption. These investments will help strengthen PayU’s technology infrastructure which will further support the key focus areas identified by PayU, which include increased omnichannel solutions and increasing credit at point of sale.
Also, AI & ML will continue to be the cornerstone for PayU’s technological evolution and innovation. In addition, the company will invest in other disruptive technologies such as blockchain. It will also focus on cloud-agnostic and adopt more low-code/no-code
development.

Can you tell us about PayU’s multifunctional mobile application for the merchants?

An assessment carried out by PayU on its merchant base revealed that 74 per cent merchants expressed the need for a mobile platform to monitor and operate their business. So in 2019, PayU launched its multifunctional PayU mobile app in response to SMBs’ business needs. With the PayU mobile app, merchants can conveniently track their businesses on the move, monitor business performance, get real-time updates and request for payments, allowing them to manage their business on-the-go. A simple user-interface delivers rich capabilities to view and track transactions through a dashboard, giving merchants’ quick access to important business data.

The ‘Chargeback’ facility is provided when the consumer escalates a dispute about a purchase to his bank. This feature includes settling bank processing errors, duplicate billing, identity theft, disputes over price charged and processed or missed refunds. The Algorithm Protected feature in PayU’s payments engine is built for global internet businesses facing evolving fraud threats. PayU constantly tweaks our algorithms, tests which attributes are most relevant, and generates compound signals to help precisely identify and block fraud.

How is PayU using next gen technologies to process documents and minimise security
threats or frauds?

It’s important to harness cutting edge technology in risk minimisation and fraud prevention. For example, through the power AI, ML, data intelligence and predictive analytics, PayU is successfully reducing the fraud, helping in improving the security of transactions. It constantly tweaks algorithms and tests, their  attributes are most relevant and generates compound signals to help in identifying frauds, irrespective of the device or network a merchant is using for his digital payment transactions.

PayU’s proprietary risk engine, developed globally for the PayU platform, is built for internet businesses facing evolving fraud threats. The in-house risk management tool is capable of processing advanced rules based on multiple parameters. The company has also deployed SHA512 and 2048 SSL Key encryption algorithms and benchmarked risk assessment processes to prevent frauds amongst merchants. Significantly, PayU’s integration with Wibmo has helped to offer innovative One-Step TM frictionless device-fingerprinting, authentication through downloadable apps, and behaviour modelling for fraud detection to PayU’s customers.

How does hybrid cloud facilitate innovation and faster go-to-market times?

In the last one year many organisations have opted for hybrid cloud solutions which
are more cost-effective, reliable, and less risky. Hybrid cloud solutions allow organisations to host their applications on multiple deployment environments, thus offering them greater flexibility to manage workload as they can move between different cloud solutions as per need.
Hybrid cloud solutions only allows enterprises to complete proof-of-concept or prototyping planning in just a few days. With AB testing and faster deployment, enterprises can also accelerate time-to-market and do faster experiments. Additionally, hybrid cloud not only helps accessing work load but also balances cybersecurity concerns with compliance requirements.

What is the future of cloud computing in terms of industry adoption?

According to a report by G2 by 2022, over 90 per cent of enterprises will rely on a hybrid cloud environment for meeting their infrastructure needs. It will become the de facto choice for businesses to unleash the true potential of digital transformation. With the IT landscape changing dramatically, businesses are integrating services to make processes simpler. One trend that is gaining momentum is integration of  IoT services, big data and cloud computing.
Here cloud computing will play a critical role as technology is the analytic platform of the data.