Razorpay · Strategy · Mid · 45 to 60 minutes

Should Razorpay enter business banking?

Razorpay is an Indian fintech company that helps businesses accept and manage digital payments. Answer this product management case and get it graded line by line against a weighted rubric.

Product strategy
Customer insight
Validation design
Go to market
Org design

The situation

Razorpay leadership has asked you to assess a possible product move beyond payments. The core business is growing, but merchants keep raising a related complaint: after they receive money, the next step in running day to day business banking and payouts is still manual, fragmented, and error prone. Sales, support, and account teams hear this often enough that leadership thinks it may point to a larger unmet need, not just isolated frustration. Why now: Razorpay already serves about 800,000 merchants, so it has a trusted base that could help it test an adjacent offer faster than a new entrant could. The tension is that this is not an obvious extension of checkout or payment acceptance. It may require different workflows, operations, and ways of working. If Razorpay moves too early, it could distract the company from its core product and step into a complex area without enough proof. If it waits, it may miss a valuable next step in the merchant journey. Leadership wants your recommendation on whether to pursue this space, how to validate demand before scaling, and what operating model would make the bet viable.

What to produce

A 2 page strategy memo.

Your answer must

State the core customer problem to solve, who feels it most, and how it connects to Razorpay's existing merchant workflow.
Make a clear recommendation, pursue now, defer, or do not pursue, and justify it with 2 to 3 reasons.
Lay out a validation plan with explicit hypotheses, low cost tests, and decision signals that would justify or stop further investment.
Propose an operating model for the effort, including how independent or integrated it should be from the core payments team.
Describe the initial distribution approach through Razorpay's existing merchant base, the first success metrics to track, and the top risks with mitigations.

Constraints

Do not assume a full scale build or broad launch before validation.
Any plan must protect momentum in the core payments business.
Use Razorpay's existing merchant relationships as the first distribution advantage, not a new channel strategy.
Be conservative about unknowns, especially operational and regulatory complexity, and make any extra assumptions explicit.

Format

Use five short sections: problem, recommendation, validation plan, team model, risks and metrics.

How Razorpay actually played it

An early Razorpay employee explains how merchants' complaints about manual, buggy business banking led the company to validate and then announce RazorpayX in 2018. The post focuses on how the opportunity was found and why the team structured it like a separate startup within the company. A helpful case on moving from a core payments product into an adjacent product line.

Listen to merchants' complaints about the next step in their workflow to find adjacent products.
Validate the opportunity before building at scale.
A new product line may need its own startup-like team and identity.
Use the company's installed base (800,000 merchants) as the starting distribution.

Built from RazorpayX: how we built a startup in a startup by Razorpay.