The Agentic Merchant Journey
From Intent to First Payment: How I cut time-to-first-payment from 5 days to 2 hours.
Context
Acquiring a new merchant is only valuable if they reach their first payment. Most fintech onboarding treats each stage — discovery, KYC, integration, go-live — as a separate handoff. At Razorpay, the median time from signup to first payment was ~5 days. For many merchants, it was never.
As Product Manager owning the full merchant activation journey, I led discovery, strategy, and execution across three interconnected agentic products, working with cross-functional teams spanning engineering, design, data, and compliance.
Problem
The result of fragmented onboarding is a leaky funnel: merchants arrive confused about what product they need, drop off during onboarding, get stuck during integration, and never realise the value they signed up for. I saw the funnel not as three separate problems but as one continuous journey with a single goal: first payment collected.
Process
Stage 1: Discovery
Merchants arrive with intent but no clarity. I built an AI-driven product discovery system that maps merchant intent to the right product stack in real time. The result was a 13% increase in account creation and multi-product adoption rising from 1.83 to 1.89 products per user.
Stage 2: Onboarding
Drawing on insights from 200+ user interviews, I designed an agentic onboarding platform that reads merchant intent dynamically and orchestrates the right path for each user. It replaced rigid rule-based logic with real-time intent understanding. KYC completion lifted 23%.
Stage 3: Integration
A merchant who has passed KYC but cannot complete their technical integration has still not collected a payment. I built an Agentic Integration Copilot that autonomously troubleshoots and executes actions across the full integration lifecycle, removing the need for support tickets or developer hand-holding.
Outcome
A merchant who finds the right product, completes onboarding, and integrates successfully — all with minimal friction — reaches first payment in 2 hours instead of 5 days. Support tickets fell by 20%. The most impactful product decisions are rarely about a single feature. First payment was the only metric that mattered. Everything else was instrumentation.