Green Sheet interviews Juspay Senior Director, International, James Lloyd

The payments industry is moving quickly, with real-time systems, open-source platforms and developer-first tools reshaping how merchants and banks approach transactions. In this Q&A, James Lloyd, senior director, international at Juspay—a fintech offering payments experience, orchestration and infrastructure solutions for enterprise ecommerce merchants and global transaction banks—shares insights on how to build adaptable, scalable infrastructure, lessons learned from India's UPI that inform Juspay's work in Brazil's Pix ecosystem, and how to balance innovation with financial discipline.

GS: 1. What foundational principles have guided Juspay's approach to building a robust and scalable payments infrastructure?

JL: Juspay was founded in 2012 with a clear vision: to simplify digital payments and enhance transaction experiences.

When India mandated two-factor authentication for online payments, it improved security but created friction for users; our aim was to remove that friction without compromising safety. From solving for a single problem, over time, we built a full-stack payments platform to support everything from authentication and orchestration to checkout design, tokenization, reconciliation, analytics and more.

We have always focused on value creation—doing more with less and making sure every innovation we bring to market creates tangible impact for our merchants and their customers. We've anchored ourselves on three pillars: robust technology that can handle scale and complexity, intuitive design that feels right to the end-user, and empowering our people to create "10x" value. That combination has allowed us to grow in a way that's both scalable and sustainable.

Today, we process over 300 million daily transactions, working with large global enterprises like Agoda, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc., and Indian industry-leaders like Flipkart, IndiGo, Swiggy, among others. But even at this scale, the principle remains the same as day one: build with purpose, design for simplicity and empower people to deliver magic.

GS: 2. What motivated Juspay to go the open-source route, and how do you see this shaping the future of global payments?

JL: The global payments ecosystem is undergoing rapid innovation with a growing diversity of payment methods, fraud-prevention tools and authentication protocols, all complicated by evolving regulatory requirements. For merchants, it's becoming increasingly complex and costly to keep up, especially when so much of the infrastructure out there is locked inside opaque, inflexible black-box systems.

We went the open-source route because we wanted to break that model. If open source is already the backbone of most enterprise software—think Linux, or Kubernetes—why not payments? Merchants shouldn't have to choose between innovation and control; they should be able to integrate the best providers for acquiring, fraud management, tokenization, vaulting, 3DS authentication, and more, without being tied to a single vendor.

In the long run, we believe open source will reshape global payments the way it's transformed other parts of the tech stack, unlocking transparency, lowering costs, and fostering faster, more collaborative innovation. It's about putting merchants back in the driver's seat and building an infrastructure that can truly keep pace with the future.

GS 3. What similarities and differences have you observed between Brazil's PiX ecosystem and India's UPI, and how are you adapting your solutions to fit the LATAM context?

JL: UPI and PiX are two of the most advanced real-rime payments (RTP) systems in the world. Both are designed to make payments more accessible to end-users while being reliable enough to handle transactions at massive scale.

Our involvement from the early stages of UPI's evolution taught us that building transformative payment solutions isn't just about technology; it's about developing a deep understanding of the market's requirements and solving for them at scale. That philosophy is what we are now bringing to LATAM, rather than simply replicating our India playbook.

In Brazil, we are working closely with local teams and building specific tools for what merchants need now. That includes support for newer PiX flows such as PiX Biometrico and PiX Automatico, creating orchestration layers that can handle the variability in PiX implementations, optimizing for the local fraud-prevention stack, and integrating with regional settlement and reconciliation flows. We're also making sure our checkout and payment routing tools work seamlessly alongside cards, local wallets and emerging APMs in LATAM.

What excites us the most about Brazil is the shift toward Pix as the dominant payment method and the rise of frictionless payment journeys, such as open finance flows. Just as we've scaled our UPI infrastructure to handle hundreds of millions of transactions a day in India, we're designing our LATAM stack to deliver the same reliability and performance.

GS: 5. What key challenges have you found in maintaining product excellence and cultural integrity during international expansion?

JL: One of our biggest challenges in internal expansion was to stay true to the DNA that made us successful in the first place. Product excellence for us has always come from being deeply embedded in the local payments ecosystem—understanding merchant preferences, regulatory nuances, consumer behavior and technical architecture of the banks and processors we integrate with. When expanding into new markets, we don't copy-paste what worked at home – we immerse ourselves in the local culture and rebuild that same depth of understanding from the ground up.

Our strength has always been a blend of first-principles thinking, 10x ambition and a commitment to doing more with less. It has helped shape how we operate in new markets. We're not chasing fast wins; we focus on solving problems that matter and building systems that last. That mindset helps us maintain product integrity and a consistent culture as we grow across regions.

GS: 6. With so many moving parts in the payments landscape, from regulation to rapidly evolving tech, how do you stay ahead of the curve, particularly in areas like AI-driven orchestration and developer-first platforms?

JL: The way we see it, staying ahead of the curve is about building foundations that let you adapt faster than everyone else: start from first principles, design for flexibility and invest in capabilities that compound over time.

This thinking drives our focus on developer-first platforms. Payments has traditionally been a black box, with limited transparency and heavy vendor lock-in. By opening it up—through our open-source product, Hyperswitch—we give developers the freedom to integrate best-in-class components, experiment and innovate without friction.

Staying ahead also means staying close to customers. Across our global offices, teams work hand-in-hand with merchants to understand their needs and then translate those insights into future-ready solutions. In a fast-moving landscape, that's how you not only keep up, but actually shape where the industry goes next.

GS: 7. What strategies or mindsets have helped Juspay balance innovation, growth and financial stability?

JL: We believe innovation, growth and financial stability are not competing priorities; they are interdependent. Innovation drives growth, growth funds stability, and stability creates the space to innovate responsibly.

One of our key strategies has been to build from first principles. We identify fundamental problems in the payments ecosystem and create value by solving them in a way that can scale across markets and years. By doing more with less, we make sure every investment, whether in tech, design or people, compounds over time.

We talk about the three Ps: people, platforms and problems. We've always aimed to hire talented people, give them meaningful challenges and support them with the right tools and systems. But we've also learned how to balance creativity with scale. Innovation often emerges from experimentation and chaos, while scale needs structure. We've taken inspiration from ideas like the "chaordic organization," knowing when to decentralize and when to unify.

Above all, we believe in long-term thinking and strategy. Businesses that extract too much value early can lose trust. We always aim to leave value on the table for our customers, our partners and our team.

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