How the Pahalgam attack sent banks scrambling to clean up digital payments

Daybreak

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?

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