- Downloads Pine Labs Q4 FY26 shareholder letter from here
Listed fintech startup Pine Labs is in discussions with the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) to enable “autonomous” UPI and card payments for merchants via its Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, its management disclosed in the Q4 FY26 shareholder letter. However, it did not share further details or pricing information.
MediaNama has sent a detailed questionnaire to the company via email, asking:
- How would the Pine Labs MCP server work? What are the use cases for merchants?
- During the Q3 FY26 earnings call, an analyst asked, “You launched agentic bill payments on LLMs, so how are you going to monetise this? How much data reaches LLMs and how much stays within Setu?” At the time, Pine Labs CEO Amrish Rau declined to comment on the privacy concerns. Now, could you explicitly tell us exactly what data goes to OpenAI and Anthropic versus what stays with Pine Labs and Setu? Are prompts and metadata retained, and is any of that used for training and fine-tuning their AI models?
- When a merchant sets up a UPI spending mandate, are they only consenting to AI agents making payments on their behalf up to a certain threshold, or also to sharing their behavioral and conversational data with LLM providers?
We will update the story if and when we receive a response from Pine Labs.
What would this mean for businesses? While Pine Labs remained tight-lipped about their UPI MCP in the shareholder letter as well as the Q4 earnings call, here’s what we think could be potential use cases for merchants.
- It will enable merchants to connect any of their AI assistants, AI agents, or automated systems directly with Pine Labs’ infrastructure to initiate, authorise and complete payments through AI (linked to Pine Labs’ MCP server).
- Earlier, payments were initiated by businesses using the Pine Labs dashboard and involved developer friction.
- Merchants can create payment links, fetch orders, and manage payments, all with simple prompts. For instance, with a simple command like “Generate a payment link of Rs 500 and send it to Amit on WhatsApp,” the Pine Labs MCP server can instantly process the command, triggering the entire payment workflow—generating the link, sending it on WhatsApp, and completing the transaction—all within a few seconds.
- Other possibilities include voice-activated payments, one-tap customer onboarding, real-time fraud prevention and checks, and AI-driven subscription retries.
On the financial front, Pine Labs reported a consolidated net profit of Rs 59 crore in the quarter ended March 31, 2026, as against a loss of Rs 29 crore in Q4 FY25. Operating revenue stood at Rs 701 crore in Q4 FY26, up 15% from Rs 599 crore in the year-ago quarter.
Where are other fintech firms on agentic payments? In March 2026, Razorpay and Sarvam AI launched voice-based AI agents that can complete food orders and payment transactions on users’ behalf without a PIN at checkout.
Earlier in the same month, the fintech firm rolled out Agent Studio, an AI-driven platform that helps merchants automate payment operations, such as recovering failed subscription payments and resuscitating abandoned shopping carts. At the time, MediaNama raised concerns about how merchant integration would work across the platform, the possibility of AI-driven dark patterns creeping into the payments infrastructure, and potential risks of price discrimination on the platform.
In October last year, Razorpay teamed up with the NPCI and OpenAI to launch agentic payments on ChatGPT. In June 2025, it became the first payment gateway to launch an MCP server for instant AI payments.
Online stock broking platform Zerodha has also launched Kite MCP, which allows users to connect their Zerodha account to AI assistants like Claude, Cursor and Windsurf. Once these AI assistants have access to the Kite Connect trading API, they can perform tasks on behalf of users, such as portfolio management, place or cancel orders and monitor market movement in real-time.
Also Read:
- Privacy Concerns Linger As Pine Labs Experiments With Agentic AI-Driven Payments: Q3FY26 Earnings
- Q2FY26 Earnings Call: Pine Labs Moves Beyond PoS, Patents Tap and Go Online Payment Tech
- Razorpay Launches AI Agent Studio, But Questions Loom Over Dark Patterns, Price Discrimination
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