Fintech glossary

API banking is the practice of exposing core banking functions — balances, transfers, payments, account creation — as programmable interfaces, so another business can build them into its own product rather than sending customers to a bank's screens.

See API Banking

BNPL is a short-term credit arrangement offered at checkout that lets a customer take delivery immediately and pay in instalments, with the merchant usually settled in full up front by the BNPL provider.

See Payment Solutions

A cash management system is software that tracks money moving in and out of a business across all its bank accounts, forecasts its position, and automates the collection and payment steps in between.

See Udyog Pay cms

Credit decisioning is the automated process of deciding whether to lend to an applicant and on what terms, by scoring their data against a lender's risk policy — increasingly with machine-learning models alongside fixed rules.

See NBFCs & Lending Platforms

A disbursement is a payment sent out by a business — a loan advance, a salary, a vendor invoice, a refund or a government benefit. Bulk disbursement means issuing many of them in a single instruction rather than one at a time.

See Udyog Pay

Escrow is an arrangement where a third party holds funds until both sides of a transaction have met their obligations, then releases them — used by marketplaces so a buyer's money is safe until goods arrive and a seller's payment is guaranteed once they do.

See E-commerce & Marketplaces

GDPR is the European Union's data protection law. It governs how personal data about people in the EU may be collected, stored, transferred and deleted, and applies to any organisation processing that data regardless of where the organisation itself is based.

See Risk & Compliance

ISO 27001 is the international standard for information security management systems. Certification means an independent auditor has verified that an organisation has documented security controls covering its people, processes and technology, and that it operates them.

See Risk & Compliance

KYB is the verification a regulated business performs on another business before onboarding it — confirming the company exists, who ultimately owns it, and that neither it nor its owners are sanctioned.

See OnboardingX

KYC is the identity verification a regulated business must perform before providing financial services to an individual. Digital KYC does this with document capture, biometric checks and database lookups instead of a branch visit.

See OnboardingX

An NBFC is a company that lends and provides other financial services without holding a full banking licence, and therefore without being able to accept demand deposits. In India, NBFCs are registered with and regulated by the Reserve Bank of India.

See NBFCs & Lending Platforms

Payment rails are the underlying networks money actually moves over — card schemes, real-time payment systems such as UPI, bank transfer networks and settlement systems. A payments product is largely an interface over one or more rails.

See Fintech Infrastructure

A payout is money sent from a business to someone else — as distinct from a collection, which is money coming in. A payout platform handles the bulk instruction, the routing, the retries on failure and the reconciliation afterwards.

See Udyog Pay

PCI DSS is the security standard that any organisation storing, processing or transmitting card data must meet. It sets requirements for encryption, access control, network segmentation, logging and regular testing.

See Risk & Compliance

The RBI is India's central bank and the regulator for banks, NBFCs and payment systems in India. Its directions govern how payments are processed, how customer data is stored, and what a payment provider may and may not do.

See Risk & Compliance

Reconciliation is matching a business's own record of a transaction against the bank's or payment processor's record of the same transaction, and resolving anything that does not line up. It is where most payment operations effort actually goes.

See ShopXpress

An SDK is a packaged library that wraps an API for a specific language or platform, so an integrating team writes a few lines in their own idiom instead of constructing HTTP requests, handling authentication and parsing responses by hand.

See API Banking

Settlement is the point at which money actually arrives in the recipient's account, as opposed to authorisation, which is only a promise that it will. Real-time settlement means the two happen within seconds of each other rather than on the next business day.

See Udyog Pay

SOC 2 is an audit standard for service organisations, reporting on controls relevant to security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality and privacy. A SOC 2 report is issued by an independent auditor about a specific period of operation.

See Risk & Compliance

A TSP supplies the technology a regulated financial institution runs on, without itself holding the licence or the customer relationship. The regulated entity remains accountable, so a TSP is contractually bound to its compliance obligations.

See Udyog Pay

UPI is India's real-time payment system. It lets money move between bank accounts instantly using an address such as a phone number or a UPI ID, without either party sharing account numbers, and it operates continuously rather than on banking hours.

See Payment Solutions

Uptime is the proportion of a period during which a service was available. It is usually quoted with the period attached, because the same percentage means very different things at different scales — 99.99% allows roughly 52 minutes of downtime a year.

See System status

A white label product is built by one company and sold under another's brand. In fintech it usually means an API suite or platform a partner resells as their own, with their name, their pricing and their customer relationship.

See White Label APIs