How Cashfree Payment's Remote MCP is redefining payment integration for India's SMEs

Many small businesses and digital-first brands find integrating payments into their operation a complex, code-heavy, and slow process. The work of reading API docs, wiring backends, and standing up dashboards often delays go-to-market and inflates costs—an overhead large enterprises can easily absorb.

Naturally, this technical barrier has created a deep divide, where merchants, such as food vendors and local service providers, get excluded from the digital payments revolution. 

This is where Cashfree Payment’s Remote MCP comes in. The Bengaluru firm has built an AI-native payments engine, enabling merchants to initiate and manage payments directly through conversational interfaces, such as WhatsApp, without any coding or complex integrations.

The fintech company—after introducing its Model Context Protocol (MCP) in April—has now become one of the first Indian fintechs to launch Remote MCP. 

“Cashfree has always been an API-first product. That’s a great place to be because we’re saying we handle payments really well. With our APIs, SDKs, and no-code/low-code platforms, integration becomes super quick,” Ramkumar Venkatesan, CTO, Cashfree Payments, tells YourStory. 

He adds, “Big software integrations used to be multi-year, billion-dollar projects. That shrank to days or weeks. With MCP—as our servers talk directly to our products via APIs—integration time falls even further.”

AI that can transact

Cashfree’s Remote MCP uses large language models (LLMs) to connect AI agents, bots, or automation tools with a business’s payment systems for secure, real-time collections, refunds, payouts, and verifications. 

For instance, when a customer requests a product or service on WhatsApp, the merchant forwards the chat or a screenshot to Cashfree’s dedicated WhatsApp number. The Remote MCP then generates a payment link and handles the workflow.

Cashfree’s new feature supports over 100 payment methods, including credit and debit cards, net banking, wallets like Paytm, UPI via BHIM, EMI options, and Buy Now Pay Later, enabling businesses to collect payments, make payouts, and manage international transactions.

“Small and medium merchants who aren’t fully online or tech-savvy will benefit the most. Using our MCP agent, they can initiate refunds directly from WhatsApp, vastly simplifying the process,” says Mayank Juneja, Architect at Cashfree Payments. 

In short, SMEs don’t need to host anything or write a line of code. Payments are triggered from the conversation itself, cutting operational complexity and costs.

Furthermore, the firm has been heavily investing in AI internally for tooling purposes and enhancing productivity, including coding, writing tests, and responding to support tickets. 

“Internally, we've released the customer care bot, and it has significantly improved over the last few months in terms of solution rate. We are now above 50%—able to answer customer queries. The faster we can onboard merchants, the faster they can transact and open up their business,” explains Venkatesan.

Currently, Cashfree facilitates cross-border payments in over 140 currencies and offers features like instant refunds and card pre-authorisation. It serves over 800,000 businesses and claims to process transactions worth $80 billion annually. 

A WhatsApp-first push

Cashfree is among the first in India to enable such payment workflows via a WhatsApp-based intelligent bot. The approach is designed to meet merchants and buyers where they already are, with support for major Indian languages, making it especially relevant for ecommerce, D2C, and services sectors.

The fintech company’s core philosophy has been around simplifying payments and identity verification needs, empowering merchants to focus on scaling their business operations.

“AI isn’t new to us—we’ve been investing in it for years. With Gen AI, we’ve expanded use cases both for customers and internally. After launching our MCP server, we’re now building on top of it so merchants can integrate much faster, and it opens our products to a much wider set of users. Even non-tech-savvy small businesses can now use Cashfree without full integration,” explains Juneja. 

For example, a food vendor serving home-cooked food, who previously tracked orders in Excel, can now run the entire cycle—order confirmation, payment collection, and refund processing—inside WhatsApp, reducing manual work and errors.

“AI is going to make the entire lifecycle of payments very easy for customers. Cashfree now lets our merchants offer instant refunds—something unheard-of in India just ten years ago,” Venkatesan says. 

He adds that in a linguistically diverse country like India, not everyone is comfortable using English or navigating apps. Many, including senior citizens, rely on others to make digital payments, often exposing them to fraud. 

“We pride ourselves on unity in diversity... While many of us are fortunate enough to converse in English, that’s not the case for everyone. So, how do we build solutions for them? How do they interact with digital platforms? With AI coming in, we can start addressing these language barriers,” explains Venkatesan. 

“Even for those who struggle with traditional app interfaces, voice-based commerce would become more ubiquitous in the coming months and years,” he adds. 

To bolster security, its AI-powered product, RiskShield, monitors transactions in real time to block fraud, countering the same AI-driven tactics that bad actors might deploy. 

On the integration side, Cashfree provides fast onboarding, API-based connectivity, and supports platforms such as Shopify, WooCommerce, and WhatsApp.

The fintech firm integrates with Shopify, Wix, PayPal, Amazon Pay, Paytm, and Google Pay across eight countries, including the US, UAE, and Canada. Beyond payment collections, it offers a payout system for bulk disbursals with real-time tracking, alongside fraud prevention and identity verification tools.