India has built one of the most extraordinary digital payments ecosystems in the world. Few countries have compressed decades of financial infrastructure evolution into a single decade the way India has from cash-dominated transactions to a real-time, mobile-first payments network. India's payments network now handles more digital transactions in a month than most countries manage in a year.

A quick look at some digital payments statistics: over 22.64 billion in UPI transactions were processed in March 2026, with daily volumes at a record 730 million. When it comes to cards, the total number of credit cards in circulation in India reached over 114 million as of late 2025, and over 1 billion debit cards outstanding in India. In 2025, Credit card transactions increased 27% to 5.69 billion, with online credit card payments reaching Rs 14.53 trillion in value.

As the country is moving into a period of heightened cyber vulnerability, particularly as its digital public infrastructure expands at scale.

There has been a surge in cybersecurity incidents from 10.29 lakh in 2022 to 22.68 lakh in 2024. As per information reported to and tracked by Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), the cybersecurity incidents doubled in five years from 14.02 lakh in 2021 to 29.44 lakh in 2025.

In-fact, over the past five years cybercrime surged at an alarming pace, with citizens reporting nearly 65.9 lakh cyber fraud complaints, resulting in cumulative financial losses of Rs 55,659 crore, according to data shared by the Ministry of Home Affairs in Parliament.

This data reflects the growing scale and complexity of digital threats in India.

Cybercriminal groups are increasingly targeting payment systems, fintech platforms, merchants, and consumers through social engineering attacks, API exploitation, credential stuffing, and identity fraud. Artificial intelligence tools are further amplifying the scale and sophistication of these threats.

Yet the workforce tasked with securing this ecosystem is struggling to keep up.

Talent shortage

As per industry estimates, India faces a shortage of over one million trained cybersecurity professionals – with the subset who truly understand payment-specific security being even smaller. This is a challenge that could undermine both digital trust and national security.

"If you look at where the cybersecurity talent pipeline stands, India currently has a shortage of over one million security professionals. When you narrow that lens specifically to payment security, people who truly understand PCI DSS, tokenisation, cryptographic controls, fraud intelligence, and the regulatory overlay of RBI, and NPCI become even fewer, making that number even more alarming," says Deep Chanda, cybersecurity expert at Ampcus Cyber.

"The growth curves are simply not running in parallel. Payments innovation is running at sprint speed; the talent pipeline is barely at a jog," he adds.

The shortage of cybersecurity talent is not unique to India, but the scale of the country's digital payments ecosystem makes the challenge particularly acute.

Every entity in the payments chain – banks, fintechs such as payment aggregators, merchants, technology vendors – handles sensitive financial data in some form. Securing these systems requires professionals who understand not only cybersecurity fundamentals but also how payment infrastructures actually work.

"There are more cybersecurity jobs than applicants," says Rishi Rajpal, global vice president – global security at Concentrix. "The demand is constant, and it's growing."

Part of the problem begins at the education level.

Engineering degrees often provide foundational knowledge in computing and networking, but by the time students graduate, the threat landscape has already evolved significantly.

"Technology changes so quickly that a four-year course can become outdated before students even enter the workforce," Rajpal explains. " The foundation is being formed, yes. But I am yet to see someone come out of engineering as a ready resource."

As a result, most organisations must rely on extensive post-recruitment training programmes before engineers can work productively on cybersecurity roles. Large technology services companies such as TCS and Accenture run structured internal training modules before deploying employees into client environments – a practice that reflects the gap between academic training and industry requirements.

Generic security training no longer enough

While cybersecurity awareness programmes have become common across enterprises, experts say the majority of training programmes remain overly generic. Employees typically complete phishing simulations or high-level awareness modules designed to meet compliance requirements. But securing a modern payments infrastructure requires role-specific expertise.

Chanda is critical of how the industry currently trains its people, and describes the dominant model bluntly. "The overwhelming majority of cybersecurity training in India today is horizontal. You get a broad awareness module, maybe a phishing simulation, and that's ticked off the compliance box."

What that model misses, he argues, is that the threat profile of a software engineer building a payment gateway API has almost nothing in common with the risk calculus that belongs on a board member's agenda.

"A software engineer building a payment gateway needs to understand secure coding, API security, and input validation. A compliance officer must understand the PCI SSC standards suite and regulatory requirements. A product manager needs to think about privacy-by-design and threat modelling. And a board member needs to understand systemic risk. Security awareness without role relevance is just noise, he adds.

The role of industry certifications and standards

Any serious conversation about payment security training in India eventually arrives at PCI DSS – the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, developed and maintained by the PCI Security Standards Council, a body formed by the major card networks.

"Trust is the foundation of India’s digital payments growth. While this growth has been extraordinary, the pace of cybersecurity skill development must keep up. Through structured training programs such as QSA, PCI ISA, and PCIP, the PCI Security Standards Council is strengthening role-based expertise, enabling organizations to build resilient, future-ready payment security capabilities, and empowering professionals to stay ahead of evolving threats," Nitin Bhatnagar, regional director, PCI Security Standards Council says.

"Upcoming PCI SSC training programs in India, including QSA, PCI ISA, and PCIP, will further support organizations in building in-house expertise and advancing payment security maturity,” Bhatnagar adds.

PCI SSC training is, by some margin, the most structured and internationally recognised pathway for professionals who handle cardholder data. Its controls network segmentation, access management, encryption in transit and at rest, regular vulnerability testing, and incident response planning.

With UPI accounting for roughly 80% digital transaction volumes; NACH handling recurring payments; FASTag processing toll collections at scale; and a rapidly expanding account-aggregator framework reshaping how financial data flows between institutions, some may believe that PCI SSC training was designed in a card-centric world. "PCI SSC introduced more flexibility and risk-based approaches, which is helpful," says Chanda. "But translating that into relevant, India-specific training content for fintechs, UPI PSPs, and payment aggregators is still a work in progress."

Although PCI SSC standards were originally developed to protect cardholder data, experts say the underlying principles remain relevant across payment systems.

"Many PCI SSC recommendations such as network segmentation and data protection apply to any form of sensitive information," Rajpal explains. "Once you understand the concepts, you can apply them beyond card payments to healthcare data, personal data, or financial transactions."

However, the continuing certification model also has a structural advantage that informal training lacks – it imposes accountability. "The exam thing is still on our mind. To clear an exam, you need to study. When you study, you clear your concepts," Rajpal feels.

In a domain that changes quarterly, that refresh cadence matters.

In addition, cost comes up in almost every conversation about professional training in India's payments sector. International certifications are not cheap. And in a market where security has historically been framed as a cost centre rather than a capability investment, discretionary training budgets tend to be among the first items cut when quarterly targets become uncomfortable.

Despite the escalating threat landscape, many Indian banking institutions continue to treat cybersecurity as a cost center rather than a strategic investment. Cybersecurity budgets often represent less than 1% of total IT expenditure, grossly inadequate for addressing the sophisticated threats in 2025, a report from Cyber Law Consulting claimed.

"I've seen mid-sized fintechs processing thousands of payment transactions a day spend less on annual security training than they spend on a single vendor lunch," says Chanda. The cost of a breach – forensics, regulatory fines, reputational damage, customer remediation, business disruption – is not fixed, predictable, or bounded the way a training budget is."

Experience still matters

There is one dimension of payment security capability that every practitioner will acknowledge cannot be taught in a classroom. Breach response.

Knowing how to contain an incident, preserve forensic evidence, coordinate across legal, technical, and communications functions simultaneously, and report accurately to regulators within mandated windows – that capability is substantially built from experience.

"The breach response comes with experience," says Rajpal. "How many people do you think in the industry have actually seen a breach? Some things you learn with experience. Training gives you an avenue, an entry point. But not the experience."

This creates a particular exposure for India's FinTech sector, where hundreds of companies now operate at significant transaction scale without the institutional depth of a large bank. CERT-In's incident reporting timelines, RBI's forensic investigation expectations, NPCI's operational security requirements – these apply regardless of whether an organisation is three years old or thirty.

Smaller payment companies are frequently underequipped to meet those expectations, not through negligence, but because they have not accumulated the operational experience that builds genuine response capability.

Certifications provide the knowledge architecture. Simulation builds the operational instinct. Real experience, over time, refines both. None of the three is sufficient alone.

"In the evolving payments ecosystem, trust is not built by technology alone – it is built by people who are trained to secure it," Bhatnagar notes.

AI – the new battlefield

The rise of artificial intelligence is reshaping the cybersecurity landscape in complex ways.

"AI is simultaneously the most significant threat vector and the most powerful enabler for training, and we need to be honest about both dimensions. From a threat perspective, AI is transforming the attack surface in payments. Deepfake-powered social engineering, AI-generated synthetic identity fraud, and adversarial machine learning attacks on transaction monitoring systems are not hypothetical, they're happening now. Any training curriculum that doesn't include AI threat scenarios is preparing professionals for last year's battlefield," Chanda says.

At the same time, AI also presents new opportunities for defenders. Engineers can use AI-powered tools to automate vulnerability detection, accelerate security testing, and improve threat analysis.

"More than a threat, there's an opportunity," argues Rajpal. "Engineers who embrace AI can do in hours what used to take a week. But that doesn't mean it eliminates the need for human knowledge. You still need expertise to troubleshoot, to debug, to make the judgment calls AI can't make for you."

Training programmes themselves may also evolve through AI-driven simulation environments, adaptive learning platforms, and real-time cyber range exercises.

However, many experts believe that the training ecosystem has yet to fully catch up with these possibilities.

What needs to change

The skills gap in India's payment security ecosystem is not going to close through market forces alone, and it is not going to close quickly. But the direction of change is reasonably clear.

Educational institutions may need to modernise cybersecurity curricula more frequently. Financial institutions and fintech companies may need to invest more systematically in role-based training programmes. Regulators and industry bodies could play a role in shaping standards and encouraging best practices.

Above all, experts say the industry must recognise that cybersecurity capability cannot be built overnight.

"The adversaries only need to succeed once. But defenders have to be right every time," quips Rajpal.

In a digital payments ecosystem handling billions of transactions every month, that margin for error continues to shrink.

- This story is brought to you in partnership with PCI Security Standards Council.