As digital payments become key to everyday commerce, payment security is evolving and needs checks and authentication. Deep Agrawal-Head of Payments, PhonePe stated how payment gateways are becoming strategic growth enablers for merchants. Deep Agrawal-Head of Payments, PhonePe told Times Now Digital, "payment gateways have evolved from being back-end transactional utilities. Today, the payment layer has evolved into a lever for merchants to drive growth for them. By moving security deeper into the infrastructure, where tokenisation and context-driven risk checks work invisibly behind the scenes - payment gateways eliminate checkout friction without compromising on safety. This ensures genuine transactions move through uninterrupted, minimizes cart drop-offs, and safeguards recurring revenue flows, directly translating seamless checkout performance into measurable top-line business growth." However, building secure and seamless payment processes involves addressing evolving cyber threats, digital fraud and tackling data privacy concerns as well. The challenge is to monitor regulatory compliance and technological innovation without compromising on the convenience and trust. Deep Agrawal-Head of Payments, PhonePe said, "the true design challenge in modern payments is not adding more security layers - it is ensuring that protection never comes at the expense of merchant conversion. True security isn't about placing visible hurdles at checkout or blocking the maximum number of transactions, which risks turning away genuine customers. Instead, the breakthrough comes from engineering intelligent, context-aware systems that evaluate risk silently in the background. By knowing precisely when to step in and when to stay invisible, we can eliminate friction for legitimate users, solve the false-positive challenge, and build an ecosystem where top-notch security and effortless checkout experiences reinforce one another." Analysts believe invisible security could be a key differentiator in digital payments and help merchants reduce abandonment and fraud risks. However, they also feel the effectiveness of this will depend on robust risk monitoring, data protection and regulatory compliance and the need to ensure that genuine transactions are not incorrectly declined or faced with hurdles. Sakshi Bajaj is a seasoned Associate Editor with over 15 years of experience in broadcast journalism. She has anchored, scripted, produced shows and w... View More