Payments, lending, and supply chain

Topics, subtopics, and what ‘flow’ means

Read top to bottom, or jump from the contents. A flow is the operating sequence a product manager should be able to draw on a whiteboard.

This handbook is the primary guide. The older track library (Payments Rails, Cards, Lending, KYC, Treasury, Open Banking) stays available as categorised deep dives. Use the handbook when you want the India and United Kingdom stories in one place.

Three layers sit under every topic. The lead sentence is the decision. The paragraphs are the mechanism. The flow is the sequence of messages, people, and money. If a number is quoted, the source and period are named. Models that are illustrative — such as an export-factoring disbursement worked example — are labelled as models, not as market statistics.

• India payments: who moves retail money, and who settles large value
• India lending: banks, NBFCs, digital lending rules, how a loan is originated and serviced
• India supply chain: domestic factoring, TReDS, and export factoring through to LMS settlement
• United Kingdom lending: the first global model — conduct, affordability, mortgages, SME credit, and deferred payment credit

Units you will see

Indian official statistics use crore and lakh crore. This guide keeps those units and adds a plain-English scale.

1 crore = 10 million. 1 lakh crore rupees = ₹1 trillion (10^12 rupees). So ‘UPI processed 22,828 crore transactions in calendar 2025’ means about 228 billion payments. ‘₹300 lakh crore’ means about ₹300 trillion of value.

United Kingdom figures are in pounds. Where a comparison would mislead — ticket size, regulation, who holds the balance sheet — the guide says so instead of forcing a like-for-like number.

The map: who does what

A payment in India is an instruction that a regulated system accepts, clears, and settles between bank accounts.

The Reserve Bank of India licenses payment systems and operates the large-value Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) system and the retail National Electronic Funds Transfer (NEFT) system. The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), a not-for-profit umbrella set up by banks under RBI’s guidance, operates UPI, IMPS, RuPay, NACH, AePS, and related schemes. NPCI Bharat BillPay Ltd (NBBL), an NPCI subsidiary, operates Bharat Bill Payment System (BBPS).

In the second half of calendar 2025, UPI was about 85.5% of payment-system volume and about 9.5% of value. RTGS was about 0.1% of volume and about 68.6% of value. NEFT was second on both volume (about 3.6%) and value (about 14.9%). That split is the product lesson: design UPI for frequency and small tickets; design RTGS conversations for treasury and large corporate payments.

• Payer and payee almost always end in bank accounts, even if the app is a fintech
• A PSP or payment aggregator moves the experience; the bank and the scheme move the funds
• Finality depends on the rail: UPI and IMPS are near-instant; NEFT settles in half-hourly batches; RTGS is gross and immediate for each payment

UPI — the retail real-time rail

UPI is an account-to-account system. The user authenticates in a PSP app. NPCI switches the message. The remitter bank debits and the beneficiary bank credits.

UPI launched on 11 April 2016. By FY 2025–26 it had grown from about 2 crore transactions in FY 2016–17 to over 24,162 crore transactions, and from about ₹0.07 lakh crore to about ₹314 lakh crore. PIB (30 April 2026) described UPI as capturing nearly 49% of global real-time payment volume. In calendar 2025, RBI recorded 22,828 crore transactions worth ₹300 lakh crore, with the average ticket falling from ₹1,848 in CY 2021 to ₹1,313 in CY 2025. Monthly volume first crossed 2,000 crore in August 2025. By July 2026, 741 banks were live.

The identifier is a virtual payment address (VPA), a mobile number, or a QR. The user sets a UPI PIN. In 2025, on-device biometric authentication and Aadhaar face authentication for PIN setup were introduced, which matters for first-time users and people without a debit card handy. Credit on UPI exists as a separate product: RuPay credit cards on UPI, and pre-sanctioned credit lines that banks — including small finance banks, under RBI’s evolving permissions — can offer. Those are credit products riding the same switch, not a change to the underlying debit flow.

Inter-PSP payments are interoperable by design. A PhonePe user can pay a Google Pay VPA because both speak to NPCI. That interoperability is the moat of the public rail, not of any one app.

IMPS, NEFT, and RTGS

Three account-transfer systems, three speeds, three jobs.

IMPS is NPCI’s immediate payment service: real-time, 24×7, used for transfers that pre-date UPI and still run as a bank-channel rail. It is smaller than UPI in retail habit but remains part of the fast-payment stack.

NEFT is RBI’s nationwide batch system. There is no RBI-imposed upper limit; a bank may set its own. It settles in half-hourly batches around the clock. From CY 2021 to CY 2025, NEFT volume rose from 380 crore to 1,000 crore and value from ₹277 lakh crore to ₹482 lakh crore. Use NEFT when the user needs a bank-account credit that is not a QR habit — salaries, vendor payouts, refunds — and when a UPI limit or VPA is the wrong tool.

RTGS is real-time gross settlement for large value. Each payment is settled individually and is final when the receiving bank is credited. In H2 2025 it carried most of the system’s value and almost none of the volume. Corporate treasuries, securities settlement, and high-value bank transfers live here. A fintech that ‘supports RTGS’ is usually initiating a message through a sponsor bank, not operating RTGS itself.

Bills, mandates, and cash-in: BBPS, NACH, AePS

Not every payment is a push from a person. India also runs bill presentment, debit mandates, and assisted cash.

BBPS is the interoperable bill-pay system. A customer pays through any participating app or agent; NBBL routes to the biller. Volume rose from 12.6 crore in CY 2019 to 217.5 crore in CY 2024, and value from ₹0.2 lakh crore to ₹7.7 lakh crore. In the first half of 2025 alone, BBPS recorded 149 crore transactions worth ₹6.95 lakh crore, with billers growing from 134 in June 2019 to 22,378 in June 2025. The product lesson is presentment plus payment: the biller’s fetch-bill API is as important as the debit.

NACH (National Automated Clearing House) is the mandate rail for recurring debits and credits — EMIs, insurance premiums, mutual-fund SIPs, salaries, and government DBT. A mandate is registered once, with authentication. Later debits can return (insufficient funds, mandate cancelled). Lending products that collect EMIs live or die on NACH success rates and the retry policy, not on the origination screen.

AePS lets a customer transact at a micro-ATM using Aadhaar authentication and their bank account. It is an inclusion rail for cash-in and cash-out where smartphone UPI is not the whole answer. PPI wallets still exist but are a thin slice of value compared with bank-account rails.

Accepting money: PA, PG, and merchants

A payment aggregator pools merchant money. A gateway is the technical pipe. The acquirer or sponsor bank is the regulated door into the scheme.

RBI’s payment-aggregator framework requires aggregators to be authorised, to settle merchants to their own bank accounts on a defined cycle, and to keep merchant due diligence current. A gateway that only passes card or UPI messages is not the same licence as an aggregator that holds the flow of funds.

For cards, India uses the four-party model: cardholder, issuer, network (RuPay, Visa, Mastercard), and acquirer, with the merchant in front. MDR and interchange are regulated more tightly on some debit and RuPay flows than a US acquirer would expect. UPI merchant payments are typically a low or zero MDR conversation at the small-merchant end, which is why volume exploded and why acquirer economics depend on value-added services, not on a fat take-rate.

Reconciliation is a product. Every success callback needs a unique transaction reference that matches the bank statement, the scheme report, and the merchant ledger. Refunds on UPI are a new credit, not an undo of the original message.

Who is allowed to lend

A fintech app is usually a lending service provider. The loan sits on a bank or NBFC balance sheet.

Scheduled commercial banks, small finance banks, and regional rural banks take deposits under RBI prudential rules and lend. Non-banking financial companies (NBFCs), including housing finance companies, lend without being deposit-takers in the banking sense; they borrow from banks, markets, and securitisation. Co-lending lets a bank and an NBFC share a single loan, typically with the bank taking the larger, lower-risk share and the NBFC originating.

Priority-sector rules push banks toward agriculture, micro enterprise, and weaker sections. MUDRA and credit-guarantee schemes such as CGTMSE change the loss given default for small loans; they do not remove the need to underwrite. Credit information companies — TransUnion CIBIL, Experian, Equifax, CRIF High Mark — hold the bureau file that almost every retail decision reads.

• Bank: deposit-funded, branch plus digital, tightest prudential capital rules
• NBFC: specialist credit, faster product change, funding cost usually higher than a bank
• LSP / fintech: journey, data, collections support — not the lender of record unless it is itself an NBFC
• Co-lending: one customer view, two capital providers, a written split of risk and servicing

Digital lending rules that shape the product

RBI’s digital lending guidelines exist so the customer borrows from a regulated entity, receives money in their own account, and can see the all-in price.

The guidelines cover loans originated over a digital platform. Disbursement must go to the borrower’s bank account, not to the fintech’s. Repayment should flow back to the regulated entity, not be trapped in a pass-through that hides who the lender is. A Key Fact Statement must show the annual percentage rate, fees, and tenure before the borrower commits. There is a cooling-off / look-up period in which the borrower can exit by paying principal and proportionate interest. Lending service providers may be used, but the regulated entity remains accountable for conduct, data, and grievance redress.

Increase-limit and automatic top-up products still need a fresh consent and a fresh affordability look. Bureau pull needs consent. Account Aggregator data needs a separate consent artefact under the RBI AA framework — it is not a side effect of installing the app.

LOS and LMS — origination versus the life of the loan

Loan origination decides whether to lend. Loan management books the asset, accrues interest, collects, and classifies delinquency.

A loan origination system (LOS) holds the application, documents, bureau and GST pulls, the credit memo, pricing, sanction conditions, and the limit. A loan management system (LMS) holds the facility after sanction: disbursements, the schedule, receivables, waivers, foreclosure, and accounting entries. Hand-off is a contract. The LOS should send a complete payload — customer, facility, amount, rate, fees, dates, bank account — and the LMS should reject it if a limit or a KYC flag is missing.

Retail term loans amortise. Interest for the month accrues on the outstanding principal; the EMI splits into interest and principal; the principal outstanding falls. Pre-EMI, when interest is collected before the full EMI starts, must be credited to a liability or recognised on the lender’s actual policy — double-counting interest at disbursement and again at month-end is a classic books error. Foreclosure bills remaining principal, broken-period interest, and a foreclosure charge, then issues a no-dues letter only when every receivable is zero.

Collections and NPA buckets

Days past due is an operational ladder first and a balance-sheet classification later.

For banks, a loan is generally a non-performing asset when interest or principal is overdue for more than 90 days, with separate rules for agricultural advances. NBFCs follow RBI’s scale-based prudential norms, which have moved toward the same 90-day idea. Before that legal line, collectors work a ladder. A practical operating ladder used by Indian retail and SCF books looks like this: current (0); early reminder (1–7); follow-up (8–15); escalation (16–30); soft bucket (31–60); hard bucket (61–90); early NPA and NPA (91–180); recovery (181–360); write-off review after that. The labels are policy, not a statute. The statute is the 90-day NPA test and the provisioning that follows.

After NPA, interest is not taken to profit the way it was in the performing book; it is parked or reversed according to the prudential circular. Collections still continue. Write-off is an accounting act, not forgiveness, unless the lender explicitly waives.

MSME and cash-flow lending

A thin bureau file is normal for a small supplier. Bank-statement and GST data are the underwriting, not a nice-to-have.

Micro, small, and medium classification follows the investment and turnover criteria notified by the government. Lenders still underwrite the actual cash cycle: who the buyers are, how late they pay, and whether GST filings match the bank credits. Account Aggregator consent lets a lender pull deposit data from many banks without screen-scraping. GST consent supports sales triangulation. Neither replaces a human look at concentration — one buyer paying 80% of sales is a supply-chain risk, which is why the next topic exists.

Working-capital products in India include cash credit and overdraft lines, invoice discounting, and short-tenor term loans. The pricing is usually a spread over an external benchmark or an internal rate, plus fees. For the borrower, the all-in APR on a 90-day discount can look very different from the headline monthly rate. Show both.

The gap SCF is funding

A supplier has shipped. The buyer will pay in 30, 60, or 90 days. SCF lets a financier pay the supplier early and collect from the buyer later.

The economic object is the receivable, not a generic balance-sheet loan. The financier’s risk is a blend of the buyer’s willingness to pay, the supplier’s ability to deliver without dispute, and the quality of the document that proves the debt. Advance ratios of 70–90% are common so a margin remains if the invoice is short-paid. The unfunded piece — the reserve — is paid to the supplier when the buyer pays, minus fees and charges.

Three structures dominate in India. In domestic factoring, the supplier sells invoices to a factor. In reverse factoring or payables finance, the large buyer approves invoices and the financier discounts them at a rate closer to the buyer’s credit. On TReDS, that bargain happens on a licensed platform. In export factoring, the buyer is overseas, the invoice is in foreign currency, and rupee books are produced with an FX rate.

TReDS — the regulated marketplace

Trade Receivables Discounting System is an RBI payment-system licence for financing MSME receivables.

TReDS platforms bring three roles onto one book: the MSME seller, the buyer (often a large corporate or a government entity), and financiers who bid. The unit is a factoring unit created from an invoice. Financiers compete on the discount rate. The seller receives funds after acceptance. Settlement runs through the platform’s settlement rules so the MSME is not waiting on a bilateral argument with one lender’s ops team.

Platforms operating in this market have included Receivables Exchange of India (RXIL), M1xchange, and A.TReDS (Invoicemart). RBI has widened what these systems may do — including more participants and tools such as insurance and secondary transfers of factoring units — so a product built only on the 2018 picture will be incomplete. The stable core is unchanged: an invoice becomes a tradeable financing unit only after the buyer side has accepted it, and only financiers on the platform fund it.

TReDS is not a substitute for a lender’s KYC. It is a marketplace and a settlement rail wrapped around factoring. The Factoring Regulation Act, 2011, still sits underneath entities that hold themselves out as factors.

Domestic factoring and payables programmes

Outside TReDS, banks and NBFCs run bilateral or anchor-led programmes with the same economics and tighter operational control.

In an anchor programme the corporate buyer’s credit is the point. Suppliers are onboarded with lighter underwriting because the buyer has agreed to pay the financier directly and, in a true reverse-factoring structure, not to exercise set-off. The legal document is an assignment or a novation plus a notice of assignment. Without notice, the buyer may still pay the supplier and the financier’s security is weaker.

Document handling is per debtor: e-invoice and e-way bill for goods, GRN for materials, timesheets for services. A duplicate-invoice check against invoice number, buyer GSTIN, and amount is mandatory. GST data can suggest the buyer list; it should not silently create a financed debtor. The underwriter still picks eligible buyers and sets a sub-limit and a tenor.

• Advance ratio: share of invoice paid upfront
• Tenor: invoice date or acceptance date to due date, sometimes plus grace days
• Discount: interest for the days financed, often on a 365- or 360-day basis — the convention must be written down
• Reserve: invoice minus advance, released after collection minus charges

Export factoring — origination

Export factoring is domestic factoring plus an Import Export Code, a foreign buyer, and a promise that rupee proceeds will be reconciled to the dollar invoice.

The seller is an Indian exporter. The debtor is an overseas buyer. The facility is sanctioned in rupees, but each drawdown is computed from a foreign-currency invoice. Origination therefore collects the IE Code (from an existing CRM record or typed once), the principal place of business, bureau consent, a declaration that the existing sanction letter has no clause that blocks assignment, financials, the signing authority and shareholding, GST consent, and the debtor list. Debtors may be typed by hand; they are not assumed from GST, because the buyer is often outside India’s GST network.

Analysis is the same credit stack as a domestic case, with trade extras: CIBIL on the Indian entity and promoters, GST analysis, financials, bank statements, the export ledger, and EDPMS or shipping history where the lender uses it. The credit assessment memo records the advance ratio, the tenor, whether collections are direct to the financier or via a collection agent, and the rating. Pricing — spread, discount rate, fees — is approved on a maker-checker or sales-head path. Sanction letters, the key fact statement, and the master receivables agreement are generated and e-signed. KYC and a virtual ID follow the lender’s constitution-wise checklist. Only then is the limit activated.

Export factoring — the drawdown, worked as a model

This is an operating model, the kind an LMS maker screen implements. The figures are a teaching example (invoice USD 100, 80% advance, FBIL 94), not a market average.

The seller uploads the invoice with the shipping bill and, where the programme requires it, a notice of assignment. Operations approve the invoice after an AML screen. The offer uses an FBIL reference rate — the Financial Benchmarks India rate for the currency — flowing from the treasury or FX function into the LOS and then into the LMS. Loan in foreign currency equals the net invoice times the advance ratio. Loan in rupees equals that amount times FBIL on the purchase date. A discount fee accrues on the convention written in the facility (this model uses 30/360). Purchase price is loan rupees minus the discount fee. Pre-disbursement charges such as CERSAI and a handling fee, each plus GST, come off the purchase price to give the net amount sent to the exporter’s rupee account.

In the teaching example: invoice USD 100, advance 80%, loan USD 80. FBIL 94 gives a rupee loan of ₹7,520. Discount rate 0% so the discount fee is zero. CERSAI ₹100 plus 18% GST (₹18) makes net disbursement ₹7,402. A forward contract may be booked for the financed dollars — in the example, USD 80 at 96 with a named bank and a contract reference — so the lender is not naked to the rupee on the day the buyer pays.

The LMS will not disburse if the drawdown breaks the available limit or the maximum tenor. Disbursement is maker-checker. The beneficiary account, IFSC, and a virtual account identifier are part of the payload. After payment, the system generates the accounting entry: the asset is the rupee equivalent of the financed foreign-currency amount.

When the overseas buyer pays

Dollars arrive in a nostro account. They are not yet the exporter’s refund, and they are not yet the lender’s income.

The overseas buyer pays into the financing bank’s nostro, often via a correspondent. The receipt may be one amount or split across two dates. Nostro charges and intermediary bank charges are deducted in foreign currency before the amount is credited onward. If a forward was booked, the covered portion converts at the forward rate. Any remainder converts at spot. The bank’s own FX charges and GST sit on top.

The lender then compares the rupees actually received with the rupees the contract maths expected. A shortfall can be an FX loss, a charge, or a reason to rebook or cancel the forward. A surplus foreign-currency amount — invoice minus the financed portion, minus charges — is the client’s money, converted at the customer rate agreed for the refund and paid back with a refund reference and a date.

A teaching reconciliation: USD 99 received, USD 80 financed, USD 3 nostro and intermediary charges, leaves USD 15 refundable. At a customer rate of 97, gross refund is ₹1,455. After ₹1,180 of FX bank charges recovered, the exporter receives ₹275. Exchange income for the lender is rupees received, minus the customer refund, minus bank charges, minus the discount fee. When the loan, fees, and refund are all posted, retirement status becomes paid and the limit is restored.

Compliance artefacts sit beside the cash: purpose codes, EDPMS closure against the shipping bill, FIRA or the bank’s realisation advice, and CERSAI where the charge was registered. They are not optional attachments at the end of a happy path.

The institutional architecture

Two regulators look at the same bank. The Prudential Regulation Authority asks whether it can survive losses. The Financial Conduct Authority asks whether it treats customers fairly.

After the financial crisis the UK moved to a ‘twin peaks’ model. The Bank of England houses the PRA, which authorises deposit-takers and major insurers for capital, liquidity, and governance. The FCA authorises and supervises conduct across banking, consumer credit, mortgages, and payment firms. A bank that lends needs both conversations. A non-bank lender that does not take deposits is typically an FCA-authorised consumer-credit firm, funded by warehouses, securitisation, or parent equity rather than by a banking licence.

The price of money in wholesale markets is tied to SONIA, the sterling overnight index average, which replaced LIBOR. Retail products may still be described as a margin over bank rate or as a fixed rate. What the regulator reads is the total charge for credit and, for mortgages, whether the affordability test used a stressed rate.

About 45 million people in the UK use credit. FCA reporting around its 2025–26 priorities described consumer-credit lending growing at roughly 8% through 2025, with households still able to repay in aggregate but with budgets stretched. That is the backdrop for every affordability control below.

Consumer credit: the conduct model

The Consumer Credit Act and the FCA’s CONC rules sit under a newer standard, the Consumer Duty, which asks for good outcomes rather than only for a signed form.

Consumer credit in the UK grew out of the Consumer Credit Act 1974: licensing, a regulated agreement, pre-contract information, and a right to withdraw in the cooling-off window for many agreements. The FCA sourcebook (CONC) adds responsible lending. The firm must assess creditworthiness — both the risk that it will not be repaid and the risk that repayment will cause harm — using information that is proportionate to the amount and the term. A thin application that only asks for income, with no verification on a large or revolving line, is difficult to defend.

The Consumer Duty, in force for open products since 2023, requires a lender to define the target market, to show the price is fair value against the cost and the benefits, to make the agreement understandable, and to support customers when they are in difficulty. It is not a slogan on the website. Boards are expected to see management information: approval rates, payment rates, repeat borrowing, complaints, and the outcomes of forbearance.

Credit reference agencies — Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion — hold the shared file. A search leaves a footprint. Products are designed around that footprint: a quotation search versus a full application search is a conversion decision as well as a compliance one. Open-banking data, pulled with the customer’s consent under the open-banking regime that came from PSD2, is now a normal way to verify income and recurring commitments when the bureau file is thin.

Mortgages: secured, long, and stress-tested

A mortgage is consumer credit with a home as security, a separate permission, and an affordability test that looks past the introductory rate.

The Mortgage Market Review put affordability, not only loan-to-value, at the centre. Lenders must evidence income and committed expenditure. Interest-only is allowed only with a credible repayment strategy. Advice is the default for interactive sales; execution-only exists but is narrow. The offer is a binding illustration of the amount, the rate type (fixed, tracker, discounted), the term, and the fees.

Funding is a mix of retail deposits, covered bonds, and securitisation. Building societies are mutual specialists in this market. Challenger banks and specialist lenders serve the self-employed and complex income, often using open-banking evidence in place of a single payslip. An FCA policy sprint on mortgage open finance in 2026 reached a useful conclusion: more data does not by itself produce better offers. Firms need trusted evidence, an infrastructure to reuse it, and a named party accountable when the data is wrong.

Conduct issues that have defined the last decade — payment-protection insurance historically, and commission arrangements in motor finance more recently — are a warning for product design. Retro-commission that the customer could not see is treated as a harm even when the loan itself performed.

SME lending and invoice finance

Most UK firms do not borrow. Those that do meet a market that is still bank-shaped, with alternative lenders and invoice finance alongside.

The FCA’s 2026 feedback on SME access to finance uses a working definition of an SME as fewer than 250 employees and turnover under £44 million. Those firms are about 60% of private-sector employment and about 51% of turnover, but only about 21% of the value of UK business loans, and about 54% of SMEs use no external finance at all. The FCA did not find that its own rules were the main barrier. The frictions it named were practical: SMEs are not always ready to apply, lenders struggle to see risk, customer-due-diligence is duplicated, the Consumer Credit Act can be a blunt instrument for the smallest companies, personal guarantees deter applications, and commission can steer a micro-firm toward a particular alternative lender.

The lending menu is familiar and worth separating. A term loan amortises. An overdraft is a revolving working-capital line priced for usage. Asset finance funds a specific machine or vehicle, with the asset as security. Invoice finance — factoring or invoice discounting — advances against receivables. In the UK this is a mature market alongside the banks, often provided by specialists. It is the closest cousin of Indian domestic factoring, with one important difference: there is no TReDS-style public marketplace at the centre. The relationship is bilateral, and the British Business Bank’s guarantee schemes are the policy tool used, in cycles, to bring lenders back to smaller tickets after a shock.

Open finance is the FCA’s proposed remedy for thin information. Its April 2026 roadmap prioritises SME lending and mortgages. The hoped-for path is: the firm sees its own cash flow before it applies; the application reuses bank data instead of asking for another pack of PDFs; the lender prices off a fuller file. That is a plan, not yet a universal pipe.

Deferred payment credit — BNPL comes inside the perimeter

From 15 July 2026, lenders who offer deferred payment credit to finance a purchase are FCA-regulated. The merchant that merely introduces it is not.

Deferred payment credit, in the legislation, is interest-free credit that finances goods or services and is repayable in 12 or fewer instalments within 12 months. For years it sat in an exemption, which is why checkout finance could scale without a consumer-credit permission. The Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Regulated Activities) amendment order, made in July 2025, brings that activity into regulation on 15 July 2026. FCA policy statement PS26/1 sets the rules. Merchants that offer their own such agreements, and merchants that only broker them, stay outside authorisation — including domestic-premises suppliers, after the government revised an earlier plan to include them. The lender does not.

The market the FCA described had grown from £0.06 billion in 2017 to over £13 billion in 2024. In the 12 months to May 2024, about 20% of UK adults — 10.9 million people — had used it. Those users were more likely than the general population to be in financial difficulty. The regulatory response is deliberately proportionate: rely on the Consumer Duty where possible, require creditworthiness and information that a customer can actually use, and bring lenders onto the authorisation, complaints, and reporting map. Other regulated agreements that happen to have a ‘buy now pay later’ promotional period were already inside the rulebook; DPC is the previously exempt product.

For a product team this changes the checkout. A soft eligibility look, a clear statement that the agreement is credit, a path for someone who cannot afford the instalments, and a complaints route to the lender are now design requirements for the lender’s journey. The merchant’s button can stay light. The lender’s decision cannot.

United Kingdom and India, side by side

Same human problem — someone needs money before they have it. Different doors.

Use this table when a global product spec says ‘do what we do in the UK’ or ‘do what we do in India’. The row that usually breaks the spec is who is allowed to touch the money, and what ‘affordability’ is measured against.

Where to go next inside Meridian

Each shelf is a track with lessons, a quiz, and — where the mechanism is visual — a diagram.

Payments Rails covers authorisation versus clearing versus settlement, then places India’s rails next to ACH, SEPA, Faster Payments, and SWIFT. Read it after the India payments topic if you need the global vocabulary.

Cards is the four-party model, networks, tokenisation, 3-D Secure, interchange, and disputes, including RuPay beside Visa and Mastercard. Treasury and FX is the home for spot, forward, nostro, and FBIL once the export-factoring chapter has shown you why those words earn their place. KYC and AML covers CKYC, DigiLocker, vKYC, sanctions, and suspicious-transaction reporting. Open Banking covers India’s Account Aggregator beside the UK and European account-information and payment-initiation split. Core banking, wealth and insurance, and fraud and embedded finance stay on their own shelves so a card-dispute rule never gets mixed into a TReDS auction.

• Payments Rails — global clearing and settlement vocabulary
• Cards — issuing, acquiring, tokens, disputes
• KYC and AML — identity and financial crime
• Treasury and FX — rates, nostros, hedges
• Open Banking — consent to read data is not consent to move money
• Fraud and embedded finance — who owns the licence when the brand is not a bank