- What gap in the business payments ecosystem led to the creation of CUPI?
While India has made significant progress in digital payments, business expenses are still managed through cash advances, employees paying out of their own pockets, and lengthy reimbursement processes. We identified an opportunity to simplify this experience by bringing the convenience of UPI to business spending. CUPI was built to make business payments seamless while providing companies with greater control, transparency and visibility over their expenses.
- How does CUPI transform the traditional expense management process?
CUPI enables employees to make business payments directly through UPI without using personal funds or waiting for reimbursements. At the same time, finance teams gain real-time visibility into spending, making it easier to track transactions, manage receipts, streamline approvals and simplify expense reporting. By bringing payments and expense management together, CUPI helps businesses reduce administrative effort and improve operational efficiency.
- How is CUPI different from corporate cards and traditional expense management platforms?
CUPI brings business expense management onto UPI, a payment method already familiar to millions of Indians. Unlike traditional corporate card-based systems, employees can make payments by scanning QR codes while operating within company-defined spending limits and controls. By combining payments, expense tracking and reporting on a single platform, CUPI offers businesses a more seamless and accessible approach to managing everyday expenses.
- How does CUPI help businesses reduce expense management time by up to 90%?
CUPI reduces manual effort by streamlining processes such as expense tracking, receipt collection, categorisation and reconciliation. Finance teams no longer have to spend as much time following up with employees for bills, manually updating spreadsheets or matching individual transactions. By automating these repetitive tasks and providing real-time expense visibility, CUPI helps businesses improve efficiency and allows finance teams to focus on more strategic priorities.
- What are the key expense management challenges faced by businesses across industries?
While the nature of business expenses varies across industries, several challenges remain common, including tracking field expenses, managing spending across multiple employees, enforcing company policies and ensuring timely submission of bills. The specific requirements, however, differ. A manufacturing company may require tighter controls over operational expenditure, while a field sales team may prioritise quick and convenient payments on the go. CUPI addresses these varied requirements through configurable spending limits, merchant controls and approval workflows, allowing businesses to manage expenses in line with their operational needs.
- How are AI and automation shaping CUPI’s product roadmap?
Our focus is on using technology to further reduce manual intervention in expense management. Automation already helps streamline processes such as expense categorisation, receipt processing, reconciliation and reporting. As these capabilities evolve, we see AI playing a greater role in identifying unusual spending patterns, strengthening policy compliance and generating actionable insights from expense data. Our objective is to help finance teams move beyond routine administrative tasks towards more informed, data-driven decision-making.
- What opportunities do you see for UPI-powered business payments in India?
UPI has transformed how India approaches everyday digital payments, and we believe the next opportunity lies in extending that convenience to business spending. As companies increasingly digitise their operations, UPI-powered expense management can help simplify payments, improve financial visibility and reduce administrative complexity. This presents a significant opportunity, particularly for small and medium enterprises and businesses with large field teams. We see business payments becoming increasingly integrated, automated and transparent, with UPI playing an important role in this evolution.
- What are CUPI’s growth priorities for the next 12–24 months?
Over the next 12–24 months, our priorities are to expand CUPI’s presence across industries, strengthen our banking and technology partnerships, and make the platform accessible to more businesses across India. We also aim to enhance our automation and reporting capabilities and develop deeper integrations with accounting and enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms. Our long-term vision is to make business spending as seamless as personal UPI payments, while ensuring businesses retain the visibility, accountability and control they need.
