In 2004, I bought a domain name. indiapay.com. It cost me about ten dollars.
I had a hunch that digital payments in India were going to be big. This was the era when most Indians still paid cash for everything, when “online payment” meant handing your credit card number to a stranger over the phone and hoping for the best. But I could see where things were headed.
So I bought the domain. Then, a few years later, I applied for the trademark. The USPTO took its sweet time, as government agencies do, and the application went in on June 6, 2008. I submitted the domain registration papers from 2004 as proof I’d been using the name in business since then. The certificate eventually arrived. I framed it. I was very proud. (It’s USPTO Serial #77492983, owned by Thinking Minds Inc., still registered and renewed to this day.)
I had no idea what I’d just walked into.
The Phone Call
In 2006, the Reserve Bank of India announced they were building India’s answer to Visa and Mastercard. A domestic card network. And the name they’d picked?
India Pay.
Yes. The exact name I’d been using since 2004 and had filed to trademark.
I found out the way everyone finds out things in India: someone forwarded me a newspaper clipping. There it was in black and white. The central bank of the world’s largest democracy had chosen my trademark as the name for their national payment system.
Now, I want to be clear. I was not a large man picking a fight. I was a guy with a ten-dollar domain and a framed trademark certificate going up against an institution that literally prints money.
But here’s the thing about trademarks: they’re beautifully, stupidly literal. I had the paperwork. They didn’t.
The Meeting
We opened our India office in 2009. Mumbai. Real office, real people, real payment gateway processing real transactions through real Indian banks.
In 2010, I got invited to a meeting with the National Payments Corporation of India. The NPCI. These are the people who would go on to build UPI, the system that now processes billions of transactions a month. But back then, they had a simpler request.
They wanted me to drop the name.
Their attorneys contacted us. Polite letters. Very formal. The subtext was clear: you’re a small company, we’re building national infrastructure, be reasonable.
I told them the same thing I’d been saying since 2006: I have the trademark. I’ve been carrying this name for years. I’m actually doing business under it. I’m running a payment gateway called IndiaPay right now, in Mumbai, with your banks.
There was a pause. Then they did the math. They realized something important: the USPTO doesn’t answer to the RBI. An Indian government body can do exactly nothing about an American trademark.
They dropped it. Went with “RuPay” instead. You’ve probably heard of it.
I want to pause here and acknowledge something: I won a trademark dispute against the Reserve Bank of India, and my prize was getting to keep a name they’d already decided they didn’t want badly enough to fight for. This is the kind of victory you tell at parties. People laugh. I laugh too. It’s funny because it’s true.
The Grind
For the next seven years, we ran the payment gateway. We integrated with multiple Indian banks. We processed transactions. We had a real office with real engineers solving real problems.
And slowly, we learned what everyone who does business in Indian fintech eventually learns: the technology is the easy part.
The hard part is everything else.
Every bank integration required approvals that moved at the speed of government. Which makes sense, because they were government-adjacent. A simple API change could take six months. A new feature required sign-offs from people who’d never used the internet for anything except email. Our business partners controlled access to the clearing houses, the settlement networks, everything. And they moved very, very slowly.
This wasn’t malice. It was bureaucracy. Indian bureaucracy is a force of nature, like the monsoon. You don’t fight it. You build around it, or you drown in it.
We tried to raise capital. We pitched the vision: India’s digital payments were about to explode, we had the name, we had the infrastructure, we had the relationships. The investors nodded politely and asked about our burn rate. We showed them the numbers. They asked about regulatory risk. We showed them the compliance files, which were thicker than the Mumbai phone book. They wished us luck.
By 2017, the landscape had changed completely. New payment gateways were everywhere. UPI was taking off. The regulatory hurdles kept growing. The banks kept moving slowly. And we were a small company trying to swim upstream in a river that was getting wider and faster every year.
We wound down the office in 2017-2018.
What I Learned
Here’s what eight years of running a payment gateway in India teaches you:
The name was never the hard part. I spent years proud of winning the trademark fight. But trademarks don’t process transactions. Relationships do. Infrastructure does. Timing does.
Being early is the same as being wrong, just with better stories. We were right that Indian digital payments would explode. We were just eight years too early, undercapitalized, and fighting bureaucracy with a ten-dollar domain.
The banks always win. Not because they’re smarter. Because they own the pipes. If you’re building on someone else’s infrastructure, you’re not a partner. You’re a tenant. And the landlord sets the rent, the rules, and the timeline.
Failure is a fantastic teacher if you can afford the tuition. We couldn’t, ultimately. But the education stuck.
Why We’re Back
So why am I writing this on the homepage of indiapay.com in 2026?
Because everything changed.
UPI processes more transactions in a day than our gateway processed in its entire existence. The infrastructure we spent years begging banks to build? It’s there now. It’s open. It works.
The NRI story changed too. In 2009, sending money to India meant wire transfers and prayer. Today there are a dozen apps competing for the business, exchange rates are transparent, and the whole corridor is a real market.
And I still have the domain. I still have the trademark. I still have the scar tissue from learning how money actually moves between India and the rest of the world.
This time, we’re not building a payment gateway. The gateways exist. The rails exist. What doesn’t exist is someone who understands the whole picture: the NRI sending money home, the family receiving it, the tax implications on both sides, the accounts, the investments, the life decisions wrapped around every transfer.
We spent eight years inside the machine. We know how it works, where it breaks, and who profits from your confusion.
This site is what we wish existed when we were running the gateway. Honest comparisons. Real numbers. No bullshit.
We’re not trying to be India’s PayPal anymore. We’re trying to be the friend who already made all the mistakes, so you don’t have to.
Welcome to IndiaPay. Again. For real this time.
— Unmesh, Founder
Still have the framed trademark. It’s in my office. The frame cost more than the domain.
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