Sumit Abhichandani

Engineering Resilient Payment Gateways: Applying AI to Prevent Failures in Global Transactions

Abstract:

Modern payment platforms operate in real time at global scale, where failures are irreversible and even brief disruptions can cascade across merchants, banks, and regions. As transaction volumes and system interdependencies grow, resilience can no longer be defined by uptime alone. This presentation explores the shift from reactive incident response to predictive, architecture-driven failure prevention in mission-critical payment systems. Drawing on real-world experience, it examines common failure patterns such as retry storms, latency degradation, silent failures, and cascading dependencies, highlighting why many incidents are inherently predictable yet missed due to static thresholds and fragmented telemetry. The session presents resilience as a core architectural discipline, emphasizing patterns including stateless processing with idempotency, circuit breakers, adaptive throttling, and active-active regional design. It further demonstrates how AI-driven analytics enable early anomaly detection, contextual risk separation, and proactive intervention. The talk concludes with a practical resilience maturity model, showing how intelligent failure design and automated recovery enable payment systems to fail safely, recover rapidly, and continuously improve.

Profile:

Sumit Abhichandani is an accomplished global leader in software QA and software development for payment gateways. Throughout his career, he has driven innovation in automation frameworks, agile integration, and large-scale software quality engineering across complex, high-impact environments. As a QA Director at Visa Inc., Sumit has transformed QA by introducing AI-enhanced testing approaches and scaling global QA operations to support digital transformation in financial services. He leads globally distributed teams and provides architectural oversight for test engineering across mission-critical, client-facing systems with stringent reliability and compliance requirements. Sumit has been instrumental in implementing AI-driven testing initiatives, including generative AI–based test creation, predictive defect analytics, and CI/CD-integrated automation. 
Beyond his corporate role, Sumit is an active contributor to the global QA and AI community, serving as a judge for prestigious technology hackathons, a session chair and peer reviewer for IEEE-sponsored conferences. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Analytics (IoA). Sumit’s academic influence is reflected in his peer-reviewed publications in U.S. based journals such as IJCA, as well as presentations at IEEE-sponsored conferences including ICSCDS, AIC, and ICAISS. His work bridges software test engineering leadership with academic rigor, advancing software testing, automation, and AI-driven enterprise systems.