78% of Indian businesses may switch payment gateways for stronger AI, Zoho survey finds
Zoho Payments’ survey of more than 700 Indian businesses signals that AI-led fraud detection, reconciliation and routing are becoming key gateway-selection criteria. Payment failures, settlement speed, fees and native ERP integrations remain major switching and retention levers.
What happened
Zoho Payments’ Indian Merchant Payments Survey 2026 finds AI fraud detection, automated reconciliation and payment routing are reshaping gateway choices among
Key facts
- 78% of surveyed Indian businesses would switch primary payment gateways for better AI capabilities
- More than 700 businesses surveyed across India
- 56% cited payment failures as their biggest payment challenge
- 61% spend one to three hours daily on reconciliation
- 20% spend three to six hours daily on reconciliation
- 14% complete reconciliation in under an hour
- 54% experienced UPI social-engineering fraud
- 62% could switch for same-day settlement
- 56% could switch for lower fees or merchant discount rates
- 50% could switch for better reconciliation
- 65% cited pre-built accounting, billing or ERP integrations with native AI as a reason to stay
Why this matters
Payment platforms should evaluate acquisitions or partnerships in fraud AI, payment orchestration, reconciliation and ERP integration to defend against rising merchant willingness to switch gateways.
What to watch
- Announced AI routing or fraud products from leading Indian gateways, banks and payment orchestration providers.
- Reported improvements in authorization rates, false-positive fraud declines or reconciliation time reductions from merchant deployments.
- Growth in multi-gateway, payment-orchestration and token-portability adoption among mid-market and enterprise merchants.
- RBI, NPCI or data-governance developments affecting transaction-data use, fraud-model deployment or payment-routing practices.
- Merchant complaints or outage data showing payment failures remain elevated despite AI feature launches.
- New native integrations between gateways and ERP/accounting systems such as Zoho, Tally, SAP and Oracle NetSuite.
- Payment gateways will package AI fraud detection, payment-failure recovery, smart routing and automated reconciliation as bundled enterprise offerings rather than standalone features.
- Merchants will increasingly deploy multi-gateway architectures to route transactions by issuer response, payment method, geography, cost and fraud risk.
- ERP and accounting platforms will strengthen embedded payments and reconciliation integrations, making finance-workflow fit a more important retention moat.
- Gateways will publish more authorization-rate, fraud-loss and settlement-performance benchmarks to substantiate AI claims during procurement.
- Incumbents will use pricing concessions, faster settlements and migration support to defend high-volume merchants considering a switch.