The missing middle: why Indian enterprises still struggle with spend management

India's fintech revolution has been, by almost any measure, a consumer-first phenomenon. The transformation has been swift and sweeping: a nation that once queued at bank counters for routine transactions now moves money with a tap. Millions transact daily on platforms built atop the National Payments Corporation of India's rails, with the Unified Payments Interface becoming as ubiquitous as the mobile phone itself ¹.

Yet beneath this consumer success story lies a curious paradox. While moving money has become frictionless, managing and controlling that money—particularly for businesses—has not kept pace. The same enterprise that can receive a UPI payment in seconds may still take weeks to process an employee's expense claim. The same organisation that embraces digital-first customer interactions often relies on spreadsheets to track internal spending ¹.

This disconnect has created a significant gap in India's fintech architecture—one that a new generation of platforms is now attempting to bridge.

The platforms emerging to address this challenge occupy what might be called the 'middle layer' of India's fintech stack. They are neither banks nor consumer-facing payment applications. Instead, they position themselves directly above regulated systems such as RuPay and UPI, serving as connective tissue between financial rails and the operational realities of running a business ¹.

The potential scale of this opportunity is substantial. According to the World Economic Forum, ecosystem-driven platforms of this nature could unlock up to $100 trillion in value over the next decade globally ¹. For India, with its rapidly digitising economy and growing enterprise sector, capturing even a fraction of this value represents a transformative opportunity.

But understanding why this middle layer matters requires first understanding what has gone wrong—or rather, what has remained stubbornly unchanged—in how Indian enterprises manage their finances.

The fragmentation problem manifests in ways both obvious and subtle. At its most visible, it appears in the disconnect between payment speed and payment visibility. A transaction may complete instantaneously, but tracking that transaction—understanding who spent what, where, and whether it complied with company policy—often takes days. The payment has moved at the speed of light; the information about that payment crawls ¹.

Consider the typical expense management workflow in an Indian enterprise. An employee incurs a business expense—a client dinner, a travel booking, office supplies. The payment itself may happen digitally, perhaps even via UPI. But what follows is decidedly analogue: the employee saves a receipt, enters details into a spreadsheet or legacy system, submits for approval, waits for review, and eventually—often weeks later—receives reimbursement ¹.

This workflow creates multiple points of friction. There is the administrative burden on employees, who must meticulously document every expense. There is the approval bottleneck, as managers wade through claims without real-time context. There is the compliance risk, as policy violations surface long after funds have been spent and the opportunity for correction has passed ¹.

And there is the compounding effect: as organisations scale, these inefficiencies do not merely persist—they multiply. A process that is merely inconvenient for a fifty-person startup becomes genuinely dysfunctional for a five-thousand-person enterprise ¹.

The roots of this fragmentation lie in how India's financial infrastructure evolved. The focus, understandably, was on building robust payment rails—on ensuring that money could move securely and efficiently between parties. This was the foundational challenge, and NPCI's success in addressing it through UPI and RuPay has been remarkable ¹.

But payment rails, by design, are agnostic to business context. They facilitate the movement of funds; they do not inherently understand whether a particular transaction aligns with a company's travel policy, falls within a department's budget, or requires additional approval. That intelligence—the layer that transforms raw transactions into managed, controlled, policy-compliant spending—was left for enterprises to build themselves.

Most did so through a patchwork of solutions: enterprise resource planning systems that were never designed for real-time spend management, spreadsheets that required manual reconciliation, approval workflows that existed outside the payment flow itself. The result was a fundamental disconnect between the act of spending and the act of managing that spending.

It was this disconnect that prompted OmniCard to pose what seems, in retrospect, an obvious question: if a billion Indians can transact digitally in seconds, why do enterprises still struggle with basic spend management ¹?

The question contains its own implicit answer. The problem is not technological incapacity—India has demonstrated its ability to build world-class financial infrastructure. The problem is architectural: the missing middle layer between payment execution and business workflow.

Addressing this gap requires a different approach than either traditional banking or consumer fintech. Banks excel at custody and settlement but are not positioned to embed themselves in enterprise workflows. Consumer payment apps optimise for simplicity and speed but lack the control and visibility features that businesses require. The middle layer must do something neither does well: translate between the language of financial rails and the language of business operations.

This translation function encompasses several distinct capabilities. First, there is the matter of real-time visibility—ensuring that the moment a transaction occurs, relevant stakeholders can see it, categorise it, and understand its context. This sounds straightforward but requires deep integration with both payment systems and enterprise workflows.

Second, there is policy enforcement—the ability to apply business rules not after spending has occurred, but at the moment of transaction. Can this employee spend this amount at this merchant category? Does this purchase require additional approval? Is this department approaching its budget limit? Answering these questions in real-time, rather than during a monthly reconciliation, fundamentally changes the nature of spend management.

Third, there is the challenge of last-mile control. In many enterprises, visibility diminishes as spending moves further from headquarters. A regional office's petty cash, a field team's operational expenses, a distributed workforce's work-from-home allowances—these represent the edges of the enterprise, where control is hardest to maintain and where inefficiencies often concentrate ¹.

The platforms emerging to address these challenges share certain characteristics. They are built to sit atop existing infrastructure rather than replace it, leveraging the investment India has already made in payment rails. They are designed for enterprise complexity, with the configurability to accommodate different policies, approval hierarchies, and operational structures. And they are oriented toward real-time operation, recognising that delayed information is often as problematic as no information at all.

The timing of this emergence is not coincidental. Several factors have converged to make the middle layer both more necessary and more feasible. The maturation of India's payment infrastructure provides a stable foundation to build upon. The growth of the enterprise sector—both in terms of company size and operational complexity—has increased demand for sophisticated spend management. And the broader digitisation of business operations has created an expectation that financial processes should be as seamless as other enterprise workflows.

There is also a generational shift at play. Employees who have grown up with instant, frictionless consumer payments increasingly expect similar experiences in their professional lives. The cognitive dissonance of paying for lunch with a tap but filing an expense report via spreadsheet is becoming harder to sustain.

The implications of successfully building this middle layer extend beyond operational efficiency. Real-time spend visibility enables better financial planning and forecasting. Policy enforcement at the point of transaction reduces compliance risk and audit burden. Streamlined expense management improves employee experience and reduces administrative overhead. And the data generated by unified spend platforms can inform strategic decisions about vendor relationships, budget allocation, and operational investment.

For India's fintech ecosystem, the emergence of enterprise-focused platforms represents a maturation of the sector. The consumer payments revolution demonstrated what was possible; the enterprise spend revolution may demonstrate what is sustainable. Consumer fintech often operates on thin margins, competing on convenience in a market where switching costs are low. Enterprise fintech, by contrast, offers the potential for deeper relationships, higher switching costs, and more defensible business models.

This is not to suggest that building the middle layer is straightforward. The challenges are substantial. Enterprise sales cycles are longer and more complex than consumer acquisition. Integration with legacy systems requires patience and technical sophistication. The diversity of enterprise needs—across industries, company sizes, and operational models—demands flexibility that is difficult to achieve at scale.

There is also the question of trust. Enterprises are, reasonably, cautious about entrusting their financial operations to new platforms. The incumbents—banks, established enterprise software vendors—have the advantage of familiarity, even if their solutions are suboptimal. Overcoming this inertia requires not just better technology but demonstrated reliability and security.

Yet the opportunity is clear. India has built world-class infrastructure for moving money. The next frontier is building world-class infrastructure for managing it. The platforms that succeed in this endeavour will not merely improve enterprise efficiency—they will complete the fintech stack that India has been constructing for the past decade.

The consumer fintech revolution asked a simple question: why should paying for something be difficult? The enterprise fintech revolution asks a parallel question: why should managing payments be difficult? Both questions have the same underlying answer—they should not be—and both point toward the same conclusion: that India's financial infrastructure, remarkable as it is, remains a work in progress.

The middle layer is where that progress now concentrates. It is less visible than consumer payments, less dramatic than digital banking, but potentially no less transformative. For the millions of Indian enterprises still reconciling spreadsheets and chasing reimbursements