Beyond Payments: The AI Operating System Powering India’s Small Businesses

Bengaluru (Karnataka) [India], April 06: Across the world, small businesses are going digital faster than ever. Payments are instant. Lending is app-based. Banking is mobile. Yet behind the sleek interfaces, financial management for most small and medium businesses (SMBs) remains surprisingly manual.

In India, the contrast is stark.

The country is home to nearly 63 million SMBs. Together, they contribute roughly 30% of India’s GDP, account for 45% of manufacturing output, and drive about 40% of exports. But speak to founders and finance heads running businesses with ₹2–10 crore in annual turnover, and the operating reality is far from digital transformation.

They tend to operate multiple bank portals, producing disconnected statements from the bank’s individual portals, and reconciling these reports using Excel spreadsheets. Furthermore, they tend to use WhatsApp for the approval process and do not typically have a single real-time view of cash across their bank accounts.

The Missing Operating Layer

As Karthik Bukkambudhi and Yadhunandan K R, two entrepreneurs, started to notice the gaps in these processes at the time they were operating their payment infrastructure company – Paywize. They were forced to confront these challenges before they could effectively serve their customers, ultimately leading them to start developing an operating system for SMBs to utilize as a financial operating system.

As digital payments adoption surged, fueled by UPI and broader fintech innovation, the rails for moving money improved dramatically. But visibility and control lagged behind. “The fintech industry has done incredible work on payments and lending,” says Karthik Bukkambudhi, Founder and CEO of Paywize. “But between money coming in and money going out, there’s this entire operating layer: visibility, controls, treasury, governance, that nobody has built for. It’s not a product gap. It’s an operating system gap.”

Indian SMBs allocate just 3-7% of revenue to digital solutions, and those they adopt are typically standalone tools that don’t integrate with each other : Google Sheets for finance, a basic POS for sales, WhatsApp for approvals. The result is fragmented workflows that leak time, money, and control at every level of the organisation. For businesses operating on tight margins and high transaction volumes, that fragmentation translates into risk: missed optimisation opportunities, delayed decisions, and weak internal controls.

The Complete Finance Solution for SMBs

For many small and medium businesses in India, managing finances can feel like juggling multiple balls at once—bank portals, spreadsheets, WhatsApp approvals—all disconnected and time-consuming. That’s exactly the gap Paywize was built to solve. Think of it as the operating system for your business’s money: one platform that gives you visibility, control, and automation, so you can focus on growth instead of manual work.

Here’s how it helps businesses run smarter:

• All your banks, in one place: Connect 30+ bank accounts via secure APIs and see balances, statements, and payments in real time. No more hopping between portals or manual updates.
• Seamless Reconciliation: AI-powered auto-matching with 99%+ accuracy means closing books becomes faster and almost error-free. Your finance team can finally breathe.
• Payments and collections made easy: Whether it’s paying vendors, managing subscriptions, handling milestone payments, or accepting UPI collections, Paywize automates the process while keeping approvals and controls in place.
• Smarter spending: Issue physical or virtual corporate cards with limits, merchant locks, and live expense tracking—so your team spends wisely without endless oversight.
• Taxes simplified: Automate GST/TDS categorisation, reconcile filings in minutes, and cut down manual effort by nearly half.

By unifying banking, payments, and compliance into a single, intelligent platform, Paywize helps businesses reclaim control over their finances. For SMBs navigating high transaction volumes, tight margins, and complex workflows, it turns fragmented processes into clear, actionable insights. The result is not just efficiency—it’s the ability to make faster, smarter decisions, reduce risk, and focus on what truly matters: growing the business.

India’s digital payments infrastructure is among the most advanced in the world. But for millions of SMBs, financial management still happens across tabs, spreadsheets, and chat threads. For 63 million businesses navigating complexity with limited visibility, that promise, if delivered, would represent more than another fintech product. It would mark the arrival of a new financial layer built for how Indian businesses actually operate.