Arun Gaddam is the Co-Founder and Director of One UPI Payments, a blockchain-powered payments platform built to solve the problems that most people in the industry never even stop to question. Before One UPI Payments, Arun spent years running an IT company focused on web and application development sitting inside the daily frustrations of businesses trying to collect money, manage cash flow, and keep their operations running. That ground-level experience is what eventually became the foundation of everything he built.
Everyone talks about how UPI changed the way Indians pay. Pull out your phone, scan a code, done. It feels like magic.
But ask a merchant what happens after that payment lands and the story gets a lot less exciting.
Arun Gaddam saw this up close. For years, he built software and payment integrations for businesses as part of his IT work. And what he kept hearing, over and over, was the same set of complaints: Why does my settlement take two days? Why am I paying commission on every single transaction? Why is this so complicated to set up?
These weren’t big companies with finance teams to absorb the friction. These were real businesses, shops, small e-commerce sellers, service providers where a two-day wait on payments could mean not being able to pay a supplier or make payroll on time.
That frustration stuck with him. And eventually, it became One UPI Payments.
The idea was pretty straightforward
Don’t touch the consumer side. Don’t build another wallet or rewards app. Instead, fix the part that was quietly hurting businesses every single day: slow settlements, hefty commissions, and clunky onboarding.
One UPI Payments was built around three simple promises:
- Get your money the same day
- Pay zero commission on transactions
- Don’t need an IT degree to set it up
Under the hood, the platform runs on blockchain infrastructure not for the buzzword value, but because it genuinely makes transactions more transparent, auditable, and secure. The key, though, is that merchants never have to think about blockchain. They just see the results.
The moment it clicked
Early on, Arun and his team did a lot of hand-holding. Sitting with merchants, walking them through the platform, explaining how settlements worked. Trust in fintech is earned slowly, because every mistake involves someone’s money.
But then something interesting happened.
A small e-commerce business one Arun had actually worked with during his IT days switched to One UPI Payments. This was a business that had been quietly borrowing money internally just to cover day-to-day operations while waiting for T+2 settlements to arrive.
After the switch, they didn’t need to do that anymore.
No grand marketing campaign created that loyalty. The product just… worked. And that was enough.
Keeping it simple on purpose
There’s a temptation in tech to show off complexity. Arun went the opposite direction.
His belief is simple: technology should be invisible. Merchants shouldn’t need to understand blockchain or settlement cycles or gateway architecture. They should just open the app and see their money has arrived.
This matters especially in India, where a huge chunk of the merchant base is trying digital payments for the first time. Simplicity isn’t just a nice-to-have, it’s the whole game.
What comes next
Arun thinks the consumer payments revolution is mostly done. The next big shift in India’s fintech story is going to be about merchants giving them faster money, smarter financial tools, and cleaner data about how their businesses are actually performing.
One UPI Payments is already working on real-time financial intelligence tools that help businesses understand their cash flow patterns using the clean data that blockchain-backed transactions naturally produce.
The bigger vision isn’t just about moving money faster. It’s about giving businesses the kind of financial clarity that was once only available to large corporations.
There’s a certain kind of founder who builds from lived experience rather than slide decks. Arun Gaddam is one of them. He didn’t spot a market gap in a report; he watched real businesses struggle with a real problem for years before deciding to do something about it.
That’s usually where the most honest companies come from.
Interview By : Kashish Srivastava
