In Conversation with Katerina Zemskova, Chief Digital Assets Officer & Chief Operating Officer at Pay10 Global
In this exclusive interview with gadget-innovations.com, Katerina Zemskova shares how Pay10 Global is building a truly interoperable payments ecosystem for global commerce — bridging cross-border payments, digital wallets and local rails like UPI. From scaling speed, reliability and operational resilience in the payments engine room to securing EMI licensing in the EU and RBI-backed expansion, she discusses the future of digital assets, compliance-first innovation, and how Pay10 aims to connect 5 countries and beyond.
1. As payment volumes scale globally, what technologies will be most critical to making payment infrastructure faster, more reliable and resilient?
As payment volumes increase, the challenge is no longer simply speed. Speed is becoming an expectation. The real challenge is maintaining reliability, security and compliance at scale while making the payment itself almost invisible to the customer.
A single transaction can involve banks, payment providers, domestic schemes, compliance checks, currency conversion and settlement — but the customer should not need to understand any of that complexity.
That is why API-led architecture, real-time processing, intelligent transaction routing and automation are becoming critical.
At Pay10, operating across different regulated markets has also reinforced something important for us: there is no truly global payment infrastructure without strong local connectivity. Every market has its own rails, regulation and payment behaviour.
2. How is AI changing the payments ecosystem, particularly across fraud prevention, risk management, compliance and customer experience?
Payments is one of the most natural environments for AI because of the enormous amount of transactional and behavioural data the industry generates.
The immediate applications are already clear: fraud detection, transaction monitoring and risk assessment can become much more dynamic, identifying unusual patterns in real time rather than relying only on static rules.
But I think there is another side that is equally important: AI should become better not only at identifying risk, but also at recognising when something is not risky.
That matters for customer experience. Better intelligence can mean faster onboarding, fewer unnecessary checks and fewer legitimate transactions being interrupted.
For Pay10, operating across regulated markets including India, the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Hungary, AI and automation can also reduce the operational burden of scale and help monitoring adapt to different regulatory environments.
At the same time, payments is regulated financial infrastructure. AI cannot become a black box. Governance, explainability, data security and human accountability remain essential.
3. What role will APIs and interoperability play in connecting different payment systems and enabling more seamless cross-border transactions?
APIs and interoperability are central to how we think about technology at Pay10.
Payments today operate across different banks, networks, domestic schemes, currencies and regulatory environments. The complexity behind one transaction can be enormous. Businesses shouldn’t have to manage all of that complexity themselves.
APIs provide the connectivity layer, while interoperability allows these different ecosystems to work together. This becomes particularly important when a business enters a new market but still needs access to locally relevant payment methods and infrastructure.
I often say that customers don’t necessarily need more payment products — they need fewer barriers between the products and markets they already use.
Ultimately, interoperability becomes commercially powerful when a business can enter another market without rebuilding its payment infrastructure from zero.
4. As Open Finance evolves, how do you see it reshaping the way consumers and businesses access and use financial services?
Open Finance can fundamentally change the relationship customers have with financial services.
Historically, financial data and services largely remained within individual institutions. Open Finance creates secure, consent-based connectivity between banks, payment companies and other regulated providers, allowing customers to access much more connected financial experiences.
At Pay10, we have seen this practically through the UAE’s regulated Open Finance framework. That experience showed us that APIs alone are not enough — customer consent, security and regulatory oversight have to work together.
And this is where I think the conversation becomes bigger than technology. Open Finance is ultimately about freedom and trust: giving customers greater freedom in how they use financial services while ensuring they understand who can access their data and for what purpose.
If that trust exists, banking, payments and other financial services can increasingly become parts of one connected customer journey rather than separate destinations.
5. Pay10 is building a connected payments ecosystem across consumer, merchant, online and cross-border payments. What is the technology vision behind bringing these capabilities onto one broader platform?
Pay10 building global alternative payment method.
The payments industry has accumulated a lot of fragmentation. Wallets, gateways, pay-ins, payouts, transfers, merchant acceptance and cross-border payments have often evolved as separate products and infrastructures.
Our ambition at Pay10 is to connect these capabilities through one broader technology layer, so businesses don’t need to build a new payment relationship every time they need another service or enter another market.
Today, our footprint spans India, the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Hungary, supported by 10 licences across five central banks and financial regulators. Our capabilities across these markets include wallets, payment gateway and aggregation, pay-in and payout, B2B and salary disbursements, utility payments, fund transfers and cross-border payments, depending on the regulatory framework and authorisations in each market.
That footprint has also taught us an important lesson: building globally does not mean pretending every market is the same.
The underlying rails, regulations and payment preferences can remain local. What we want to standardise is the experience and connectivity above them.
That is what “One Platform” ultimately means to me: locally relevant infrastructure that increasingly feels like one connected payment ecosystem to the customer.
