Ixigo plans to let users pay for travel bookings by voice, a feature now under compliance review. The plan meets a design assumption baked into India’s digital payment rules: that a person actively authenticates each transaction. The Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) Authentication Mechanisms Directions, 2025, require two distinct factors for every domestic digital payment, with at least one of them being dynamic and unique to that transaction, such as a one-time password (OTP). Voice-first payments are built to remove exactly that step.
Group CEO Aloke Bajpai told Mint that the technology is not the difficulty; the safeguards are. A voice instruction leaves no automatic audit trail, unlike a tap, so Ixigo wants every voice transaction backed by a verifiable record proving that the user authorised it. “We want to do it in a way that doesn’t lead to inadvertent payments,” Bajpai said.
How the rule shapes voice payments: The 2025 directions do not require a specific technology. For non-card-present transactions, they require that at least one factor be either dynamically generated (an OTP) or “capable of being proven,” such as a biometric. That second limb is the opening. A voiceprint, if it qualifies as a factor “capable of being proven,” could satisfy the requirement rather than violate it.
There is also a simpler route: the human still receives the OTP and can supply it, so an agent-assisted payment need not bypass two-factor authentication at all, as MediaNama’s Founder-Editor Nikhil Pahwa has noted. The compliance question, therefore, is not whether voice payments are allowed, but whether a spoken instruction can be engineered into a valid authentication factor and an auditable record.
Where the rules already make exceptions:
- Small-value contactless card transactions are exempt from mandatory two-factor authentication.
- Recurring transactions under the e-mandate framework, after the first payment, do not require repeated authentication.
Voice payments would target the same low-friction space. The Digital Payments E-Mandate Framework, 2026 permits recurring transactions up to Rs 15,000 without an additional factor of authentication (AFA), but it still requires one human AFA to register the mandate and another for the first payment. The friction Ixigo wants to remove is front-loaded, not eliminated.
Three unresolved questions
- Consent. How a spoken instruction is captured and proven as valid authorisation.
- Audit trail. What counts as a verifiable record of a voice transaction.
- Liability. Who bears the cost of a wrongful or accidental charge. The e-mandate framework applies the RBI’s limited-liability rules for unauthorised transactions to recurring payments, but a mistaken voice charge does not map cleanly onto “unauthorised.”
A framework for agentic payments is now being built: Neither the e-mandate rules nor the 2025 directions currently contemplate an AI agent initiating a payment on a spoken…
Source link
Disclaimer
We strive to uphold the highest ethical standards in all of our reporting and coverage. We blogs.grocliq.com want to be transparent with our readers about any potential conflicts of interest that may arise in our work. It’s possible that some of the investors we feature may have connections to other businesses, including competitors or companies we write about. However, we want to assure our readers that this will not have any impact on the integrity or impartiality of our reporting. We are committed to delivering accurate, unbiased news and information to our audience, and we will continue to uphold our ethics and principles in all of our work. Thank you for your trust and support.
Website Upgradation is going on for any glitch kindly connect at [email protected]
