Razorpay on Tuesday, 18 August unveiled Razorpay Vulcan, India's first transformer-based AI foundation model built exclusively for payments, developed in partnership with NVIDIA and Amazon Web Services (AWS). The model is designed to make digital transactions more reliable, secure, and predictable across India's rapidly expanding digital economy.

What Razorpay Vulcan Is

Razorpay describes Vulcan as a unified AI intelligence layer that replaces fragmented machine-learning models with a single, continuously learning system. Built on Amazon SageMaker, the model consolidates billions of transaction insights to power real-time decisions across payment routing, fraud detection, authentication, and checkout optimisation. It is the first foundation model of its kind purpose-built for the payments domain in India.

Scale of Deployment and Early Results

Early components of Vulcan have already been deployed across approximately 3 trillion data points on Razorpay's payments network. According to the company, the model has delivered measurable outcomes at scale: payment success rates have improved by up to 10 per cent, international card fraud detection has improved eight times, and the system identifies five times more fraudulent or disputed transactions without increasing alert volumes. On its Magic Checkout platform, 40 per cent more shoppers can now see their preferred UPI application, facilitating an additional 1–2 lakh purchases every month.

The model's development was informed by an internal study covering 1.5 million shoppers and more than 51,000 businesses, which found that payment-related friction affected consumers across both metropolitan and smaller markets — underscoring the scale of the problem Vulcan aims to solve.

What the Companies Said

Harshil Mathur, CEO and Co-founder of Razorpay, said the initiative was aimed at making digital payments more dependable for consumers who were still deciding whether to trust digital transactions over cash — a significant segment in a market where cash on delivery remains a dominant preference.

Pahal Patangia, Head of Global Industry Business Development and Payments at NVIDIA, said India's rapidly evolving digital economy is creating an opportunity to make payments more intelligent, reliable, and secure.

Kiran Jagannath, Head of FSI and Conglomerates at AWS India and South Asia, described the model as one that 'consolidates billions of transaction insights into a single, continuously learning intelligence layer, replacing fragmented ML models with unified AI that delivers higher payment success rates, rapid iteration, and enterprise-grade security for mission-critical payment flows.'

Why It Matters for India's Payments Ecosystem

India's payments infrastructure is among the world's most complex, spanning UPI, cards, net banking, wallets, and cash on delivery, routed through hundreds of banks and payment gateways. Vulcan is designed to assess available payment routes in real time and select the optimal path before a transaction is even attempted — a capability that could meaningfully reduce failure rates at scale. This comes amid India's digital commerce market continuing its rapid expansion, with payment reliability emerging as a key bottleneck for merchant and consumer trust alike.

What Comes Next

Razorpay said Vulcan will eventually be expanded to power decisions across the full payments stack — including authentication, routing, fraud detection, and lending. The rollout signals a broader industry shift toward AI-native payment infrastructure, and positions Razorpay as an early mover in applying large-model architecture to financial services at India scale.