Fintech company AvenuesAI, formerly known as Infibeam Avenues, has launched PayCentral, an agentic payments platform that lets AI agents complete payments without a person manually initiating each transaction. The platform comes out of PhroneticAI, an AvenuesAI subsidiary, and positions AI as the next layer sitting on top of India's payment rails.
Highlights#
The core mechanic is agent-to-agent. One AI agent, say a merchant's shopping assistant, talks directly to another AI agent, such as a payment gateway's assistant, to close transactions, issue payment links, handle refunds, and run subscriptions end to end. Vishal Mehta, AvenuesAI's chairman and managing director, announced the launch during the company's Q1 FY27 earnings call and framed the shift as "Uberizing payments": removing friction between intent, commerce, and payment without displacing the merchant or the consumer.
The backdrop matters. India's National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is reportedly working on a Unified Agent Protocol that would let AI agents transact over UPI, and the debate over how much autonomy agents should get on those rails is active. MediaNama's editor Nikhil Pahwa has argued NPCI should issue agents delegated UPI handles with a separate agent PIN enabled by default.
PayCentral is also being applied to merchant onboarding. Mehta described AI's role in three stages: boosting human productivity, replacing humans from parts of the loop, and finally doing work that was simply not feasible before, like auditing the full transaction ledger line by line. He noted growth is running faster in international markets than in India so far.
Why it matters#
India's payment aggregators are moving from AI-assisted checkout to agents that transact autonomously with each other. The open questions are exactly the ones A2AWire exists to answer: who escrows the funds, who vouches for the counterparty agent, and how disputes get resolved when no human clicked approve.