How Cashfree’s Pulse Turns Complex Data Into Real-Time Business Insights For Merchants

Over the past few years, India has become one of the world’s fastest-growing hubs for online businesses. D2C brands, SaaS companies, local sellers and digital-first MSMEs have scaled at a pace that would’ve been unimaginable a decade ago. Customer experiences have become faster, smarter and more intuitive, but the same can’t be said for how founders of these businesses access and understand their own businesses.

This operational gap is becoming more visible as businesses expand. 

A study by Vi Business shows that nearly 60% of MSMEs intend to digitise their business processes, with 43% planning to raise their digitisation budget by the end of 2025. 

Yet mobile phone interfaces largely remained stuck in the desktop era, slowing the pace of digital commerce. 

Most mobile payment apps overwhelm business owners with raw, unstructured data rather than clear, actionable insights. Important actions like tracking settlements, processing refunds, managing disputes and understanding performance trends are often scattered across screens, non-intuitive layouts or delayed refresh intervals. The outcome is that merchants often move between multiple tools to access basic operational information.

The friction stems from that most dashboards were originally designed for desktop use and later adapted to mobile, creating usability gaps. The consequence for merchants is slow navigation, insights that only appear when you go hunting for them and a dependency on desktop for decisions that should be at the fingertips of the merchants.

For founders who operate in real time, this creates a gap where speed matters most. Their day runs on rapid checks between meetings, real-time decisions during spikes, and immediate visibility during cashflow-sensitive moments. A modern, mobile-first business thus, needs an equally smart, pocket-first companion that keeps pace with its rhythm. 

Recognising this widening gap between how businesses operate and how their data is accessed, Bangalore-based payments company Cashfree Payments began rethinking the mobile experience from the ground up, not as a smaller version of a dashboard, but as a purpose-built companion designed for speed, clarity and real-time action. 

This led to the creation of Pulse, a companion app intended to streamline key payment workflows on the phone.

The app is designed keeping what modern-age founders want. A modern UX which is intuitive to their needs instead of just being transactional. Its power lies in providing deep business metrics and insights with the aim of enabling founders with quick, easy and on-the-go access to their business, helping them super scale their operations.

Pulse: An App Built for Faster Decision-Making

Pulse was shaped both by Cashfree’s product roadmap and by feedback from founders who wanted faster access to essential business information. This led the team to rethink the mobile payments experience with a focus on clarity, speed and on-the-go actionability.

Pulse attempts to move from static reporting to a more action-oriented mobile workflow. This shift is centred on three core priorities: 

1. Instant access: Enabled by biometric authentication, the app can be accessed instantly and securely, on-the-go, literally within a fingertap, making the navigation and entire toggle process super simple and seamless. Further, the app is optimised for less than three taps to reach any key data point or perform a core task. Its mobile-first workflow boasts of fastening routine but critical operations like issuing refunds, generating payment links and managing disputes. It also gives founders access to chat directly with support or an account manager through an in-app chatbot – all without switching devices or contexts.
2. Surface critical business metrics upfront: The interface presents key metrics like payments, settlement amount, settlement time, refunds and disputes, etc. upfront for quicker decision-making., further enabling founders to focus on business opportunities that have potential to scale. It also tracks week-over-week or month-over-month performance instantly. 
3. Window to dig deeper: Founders often want to look beyond daily numbers and understand the trends shaping their business. Pulse offers a dedicated ‘Insights’ tab that helps them do exactly that, with simple, actionable intelligence like month-on-month average order value, top cities driving orders, preferred payment methods and more, all designed to support sharper, data-backed decisions.

“Every screen was designed around one question: ‘What does the merchant need in the next 30 seconds?’ That’s where we come from,” said Nitin Pulyani, SVP & head of product, Cashfree Payments. 

Pulse is designed around four ideas — clarity, speed, predictable navigation and insights that explain context instead of simply displaying data.

For MSMEs, real-time data is essential for cash planning and everyday decisions. Pulse uses the same low-latency data pipeline as Cashfree’s core payments system, so merchants receive up-to-date information across workflows. The continuous sync process is meant to reduce delays in updates.

“Pulse gives founders exactly what they’ve been missing — real-time clarity. When you can see what’s working, what’s slowing down and what needs your attention instantly, you make faster, sharper decisions. That’s the impact we want to unlock for every business,” said Pulyani.

On the security side, Pulse maintains the high rigour of Cashfree’s systems with biometric authentication such as fingerprint or face ID for fast, secure one-tap access, two-factor authentication (2FA) for login, session management with secure token handling and automatic session expiry, and role and permission-based access for multi-user merchant accounts. 

While Pulse is built to be intuitive, Cashfree has enabled merchants who ever feel stuck through immediate in-app support, including information guides that explain what a metric means and chat support for quick resolution. Help documentation and guides are also being updated to reflect the new mobile-first experience.

“With Pulse, we’re empowering founders to grow faster by placing instant, actionable business intelligence directly in their hands. The app includes adaptive elements that update insights based on merchant usage patterns. It actively tracks behavioural signals such as frequent searches, commonly viewed metrics, time patterns (when merchants check data) and their product mix (links, payment gateways and so on). Over time, insights and suggestions will adapt to these unique patterns, making the app more personalised and useful” Pulyani said. 

According to the company, roughly 5,000 merchants are already accessing the app weekly.

An AI-Native Command Centre 

Pulse sits within Cashfree’s broader shift toward AI-enabled tools across its product suite.

Pulse’s next phase includes an AI-driven assistant that can interpret a merchant’s data and provide actionable guidance. It will explain trends or anomalies in plain language, work through text or voice, and surface insights such as high-performing regions or early signs of declining conversions. It will also offer industry-specific benchmarks and metrics for different lines of business.

Building this capability involves condensing heavier intelligence models into a mobile-friendly format without compromising usability.

Cashfree aims for Pulse to eventually become a primary mobile tool for merchants — a single interface for collections, payment links and, over time, more products across the Cashfree ecosystem.

The team also plans to roll out the AI business assistant, expand the number of products supported within the app, add more industry-specific insights, enable deeper analysis and refine notifications to help merchants stay updated on important business events.

The core metrics for success will focus on daily active merchants, insight engagement, time spent on the app, frequency of open per merchant, time-to-information, and merchant feedback, rather than just raw volume. Cashfree is targeting a goal to have more than 75% of its consumer base engage with its mobile app daily, with a customer satisfaction rate exceeding 80%.

As more founders run their businesses from their phones, the expectation from mobile tools to be clear, fast and reliable only grows. Pulse is Cashfree’s attempt to meet that moment. How far it goes will depend on its ability to turn real-time data into usable insights and become a dependable part of the merchant’s daily workflow.