Relay is a set of software agents that Cashfree Payments now gives its merchants to run the operational work sitting around a payment. The Indian provider, licensed by the Reserve Bank of India as a payment aggregator, opened it in beta in May 2026 and to every merchant on 26 August 2026. Five use cases are announced: retrying a failed payment, chasing an abandoned cart, confirming a cash-on-delivery order, recovering a failed subscription, and filing a dispute before the deadline.
Founded in Bengaluru in 2015, the company claims more than 800,000 business customers and over $80 billion in annualised processing volume. Relay is free at launch. Outcome-based pricing is announced for later.
An acquirer working on thin processing margins
The merchant discount rate, or MDR, is the fee a merchant pays on each electronic payment it accepts. In India it is zero on UPI, the dominant instant payment system, while the same merchant pays 1.5 to 2 per cent on a credit card and up to 0.90 per cent on a debit card. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman set out those figures on 10 August 2026, before a Parliament that had just passed the Taxation and Other Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2026. The Bill makes a charge on UPI possible without creating one. The decision passes to the steering committee chaired by the National Payments Corporation of India.
That Rs 20,000 crore target, or 200 billion rupees, is hard to read without a yardstick. UPI handled 2,366 crore transactions worth Rs 29.9 lakh crore in July 2026 alone, which puts the target at about 0.7 per cent of a single month on that one system. Business Standard ties the target to the agents that nudge shoppers about to abandon a transaction, by voice, by message or with a discount. No time horizon has been published.
What the agent actually touches
Retrying a failed payment creates a fresh authorisation request. The declined attempt is closed. The next one carries its own transaction identifier, travels back to the issuing bank and can fail on a different decline reason. How many retries are allowed, and how far apart, is set by the rules of the rail being used.
Recovering a failed subscription runs through a mandate, the standing authorisation a payer gives for an amount to be debited when it falls due, within the ceiling and the frequency the payer has set. The agent does not recreate that authorisation. It replays a debit under an existing mandate, or it asks the customer to set up a new one.
Filing a dispute enters a dispute process whose deadlines are set elsewhere. On cards, the schemes, Visa and Mastercard chief among them, publish the filing windows and the reason codes they will accept. Evidence submitted late loses the money without any review of the merits, however strong the merchant’s position may be. On UPI, the National Payments Corporation of India runs its own procedures. The agent works the calendar. The merits of the case stay with the merchant.
Chasing an abandoned cart leaves the payment system and enters the customer relationship. Mayank Juneja, director of engineering at Cashfree Payments, describes the practice it replaces: growth teams that call the shopper and can offer a discount. The agent takes that job over with the same pricing lever. Outbound marketing and discount policy belong to the merchant.
| Agent | Action | What it commits |
|---|---|---|
| Failed payment | Fresh authorisation | The issuer and the rail |
| Abandoned cart | Call or message, discount possible | The customer and pricing |
| Cash-on-delivery order | Confirmation before dispatch | Logistics |
| Failed subscription | Replayed debit or new mandate | The mandate |
| Dispute | Dispute filed before the deadline | The scheme or NPCI |
Vulcan, the same squeeze from the other end
Razorpay, a direct rival in Indian acquiring, presented Vulcan in August 2026, describing it as the first transformer-based foundation model for payments built and hosted in India. Founder Harshil Mathur reports training on 4 billion payments and 3 trillion data points, and around 3,000 signals per transaction. Built with NVIDIA and AWS, it covers routing, fraud, risk and personalisation, meaning the decisions taken during the transaction itself.
The two products do not meet. Vulcan works during authorisation, where the route is picked and the decline is decided. Relay works afterwards, on what the decline leaves hanging. The same squeeze sits behind both, because processing margins stay thin for the Indian acquirer, a point Business Standard makes when it presents the agent as a new revenue line. MediaNama notes that Razorpay has published no methodology, no period and no sample behind its beta results.
Outcome-based pricing has yet to be built. Co-founder Reeju Datta names carts converted through the agent and disputes resolved as the parameters. Charging for an outcome means being able to attribute it, and a cart converted after an automated follow-up might well have converted without one. Business Standard reports a further use under consideration, loan recovery.