PayU launches AI fraud protection for Indian merchants taking international card payments

PayU’s Fraud Liability Protect adds risk-based authentication and chargeback protection to its checkout platform for cross-border card transactions. The company says the tool, already used by Zomato, can lift international card approval rates while reducing fraud exposure.

— Source publishedFri, 11 Sept, 2026, 17:42 IST·First seen Fri, 11 Sept, 2026, 18:04 IST·Source Medianama

What happened

PayU launched Fraud Liability Protect, an AI-driven tool for Indian merchants accepting international card payments. Integrated with PayU Checkout and used by

Key facts

  • 4-5% improvement in international card payment success rates
  • 14% improvement in payment success rates for an online travel merchant
  • 83% reduction in fraud-to-sales ratio for an online travel merchant

Why this matters

The launch positions PayU as a more strategic cross-border checkout partner, making fraud-tech, identity, and risk-decisioning capabilities attractive partnership or acquisition targets.

What to watch

  • Reported adoption of Fraud Liability Protect among PayU's large travel, marketplace and D2C merchants.
  • Whether the reported approval-rate lift holds by geography, card network, transaction value and merchant vertical.
  • Chargeback-rate trends and the share of fraud losses retained by PayU versus merchants.
  • Changes in checkout abandonment or authentication challenge rates after risk-based controls are deployed.
  • Competitor announcements from Razorpay, Cashfree, Juspay, Stripe, Adyen and card networks around chargeback protection or AI fraud scoring.
  • Growth in international-card payment volume and merchant cross-border GMV processed through PayU.
  • Evidence that merchants increase foreign marketing spend or international assortment after payment-success improvements.
  • Package Fraud Liability Protect with international-card acquiring, currency conversion and dispute-management services for travel, hospitality, marketplaces and export-oriented D2C merchants.
  • Use Zomato and travel-merchant performance data to publish vertical-specific ROI benchmarks, emphasizing recovered revenue from false-decline reduction rather than fraud prevention alone.
  • Offer performance-linked pricing or capped liability terms to overcome merchant skepticism about incremental fraud-protection fees.
  • Expand integrations with card-network authentication, device intelligence and merchant order-management data to improve approval decisions without increasing checkout friction.
  • Target merchants currently spending heavily on overseas acquisition, where a 4–5% approval lift can materially improve marketing payback and customer lifetime value.