Just two days after the Pahalgam terror attack, alarm bells went off inside India’s financial system. A stern message from an HDFC Bank executive summed up the mood: “They may come for us now.”The national security tragedy triggered a sudden and sweeping crackdown on India’s digital payments ecosystem. Behind closed doors in Delhi, top officials from the Finance Ministry, Home Affairs, and the Reserve Bank of India launched a coordinated push to track suspicious merchant activity online like gambling, betting, drug trafficking. The idea was to follow the money all the way to its possible links with terror funding.The fallout? Payment aggregators are scrambling, banks are under intense pressure, and merchant screening firms are suddenly flooded with work. Everyone’s rechecking everything. But who's the collateral damage?Tune in. If you have any thoughts or questions about this episode, send them to us as texts or voice notes on Daybreak’s WhatsApp at +918971108379. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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