OpenAI deepens India push with Pine Labs fintech partnership

As India positions itself as a worldwide centre for applied artificial intelligence, OpenAI has struck a partnership with Pine Labs to bring AI-based reasoning into the fintech company’s payments stack. The two companies say the integration will automate settlement and invoicing workflows and could help speed up AI-led commerce across India.

Under the partnership, Pine Labs will incorporate OpenAI’s application programming interfaces — software tools that enable businesses to integrate AI capabilities into their existing products — into its payments and commerce infrastructure. The goal, the companies said on Thursday, is to enable AI-assisted settlement, reconciliation, and invoicing workflows across Pine Labs’ platform.

The agreement highlights OpenAI’s broader effort to expand in India, one of its fastest-growing markets, as it aims to move beyond being seen mainly as the company behind ChatGPT and instead embed its technology across education, enterprise, and core digital infrastructure. Earlier this week, OpenAI teamed up with major Indian engineering, medical, and design institutions to introduce AI tools in higher education, betting that India’s large developer community and more than a billion internet users will be central to the next wave of AI adoption.

Pine Labs is already deploying AI internally to automate portions of settlement and reconciliation, reducing the time required to clear daily settlements from hours to minutes, according to chief executive B Amrish Rau. The Noida-based firm previouslyreliedd on manual checks by dozens of staffers to reconcile funds from multiple banks before markets opened each day. That process is now largely handled by AI-driven systems, Rau said in an interview.

For Pine Labs, the partnership is designed to push those AI-driven efficiency gains beyond internal operations and into tools used by merchants and corporate customers. The company plans to begin with business-to-business use cases such as invoicing, settlements, and payments orchestration, Rau told. He said Pine Labs expects faster uptake in B2B workflows, where AI agents can manage high volumes of repetitive financial tasks under defined rules, before similar capabilities become common in consumer-facing payments.

“People talk about retail AI, but the bigger impact of all of this is really efficiency improvement, especially in B2B,” Rau said. “If you look at invoicing and settlement, those are workflows where agents can actually drive the process end to end, and that’s where adoption can happen faster.”

Rau added that the shift toward more autonomous, agent-led payment workflows will likely move more quickly in overseas markets where regulations already permit such activity. In India, he said, adoption will likely be more gradual and focus on AI-assisted commerce rather than fully agent-initiated payments, as local rules require tighter controls on how payments are authorised. He said Pine Labs is already prototyping agent-driven payments in parts of the Middle East and Southeast Asia, even as India’s regulatory framework calls for more stringent authorisation safeguards.

For OpenAI, the partnership offers a path deeper into India’s payments and enterprise environment as it seeks to go beyond consumer tools and embed its models into high-volume, regulated workflows. Rau said the collaboration is intended to increase merchant stickiness and broaden Pine Labs’ role from a payments processor into a larger commerce platform. Over time, he said, higher transaction volumes could translate into incremental revenue.

Pine Labs says it works with more than 980,000 merchants, 716 consumer brands, and 177 financial institutions, and has processed over 6 billion cumulative transactions worth more than ₹11.4 trillion (around $126 billion), according to its prospectus published last year. The fintech operates in 20 countries, including Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, parts of Africa, the UAE, and the U.S., giving the OpenAI partnership reach that spans both Indian and international markets.

Rau said the deal does not include revenue sharing between the two companies, and Pine Labs will not take a cut if its merchants choose to embed OpenAI’s tools. “We’ve kept it completely independent of each other — anything related to payment and payment services, we will get the benefit of it, and anything related to OpenAI revenues will go to them,” he said.

He also said the partnership is not exclusive. Rau likened it to OpenAI’s partnership with Stripe in the U.S. and noted that Pine Labs remains open to collaborating with other AI providers.

As Pine Labs integrates AI more deeply into its payment systems, Rau said the company is building additional security and compliance layers around AI-driven workflows to ensure sensitive merchant and consumer transaction data remains protected. He said the priority is to ensure transactions remain secure and compliant, even as AI automates more processes.

Pine Labs’ push toward AI-driven commerce builds on earlier experimentation through its Setu unit, which has tested agent-led bill payment experiences using chatbots, ts including ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. Separately, India began piloting consumer payments directly through AI chatbots last year.

The announcement also arrives as India hosts its AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, where global AI firms, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, are presenting their latest capabilities, alongside Indian startups demonstrating AI applications intended for large-scale deployment across sectors such as finance, healthcare, and education.