An AI-powered Smart Routing Solution for Payment Systems

In the current era of digitization, online payment systems are attracting considerable interest. Improving the efficiency of a payment system is important since it has a substantial impact on revenues for businesses. A gateway is an integral component of a payment system through which every transaction is routed. In an online payment system, payment processors integrate with these gateways by means of various configurations such as pricing, methods, risk checks, etc. These configurations are called terminals. Each gateway can have multiple terminals associated with it. Routing a payment transaction through the best terminal is crucial to increase the probability of a payment transaction being successful. Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques can be used to accurately predict the best terminals based on their previous performance and various payment-related attributes. We have devised a pipeline consisting of static and dynamic modules. The static module does the initial filtering of the terminals using static rules and a logistic regression model that predicts gateway downtimes. Subsequently, the dynamic module computes a lot of novel features based on success rate, payment attributes, time lag, etc. to model the terminal behaviour accurately. These features are updated using an adaptive time decay rate algorithm in real-time using a feedback loop and passed to a random forest classifier to predict the success probabilities for every terminal. This pipeline is currently in production at Razorpay routing millions of transactions through it in real-time and has given a 4-6\% improvement in success rate across all payment methods (credit card, debit card, UPI, net banking). This has made our payment system more resilient to performance drops, which has improved the user experience, instilled more trust in the merchants, and boosted the revenue of the business.

Blindness (Diabetic Retinopathy) Severity Scale Detection

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a severe complication of diabetes that can cause permanent blindness. Timely diagnosis and treatment of DR are critical to avoid total loss of vision. Manual diagnosis is time consuming and error-prone. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning based method for automatic screening of retinal fundus images to detect and classify DR based on the severity. The method uses a dual-path configuration of deep neural networks to achieve the objective. In the first step, a modified UNet++ based retinal vessel segmentation is used to create a fundus image that emphasises elements like haemorrhages, cotton wool spots, and exudates that are vital to identify the DR stages. Subsequently, two convolutional neural networks (CNN) classifiers take the original image and the newly created fundus image respectively as inputs and identify the severity of DR on a scale of 0 to 4. These two scores are then passed through a shallow neural network classifier (ANN) to predict the final DR stage. The public datasets STARE, DRIVE, CHASE DB1, and APTOS are used for training and evaluation. Our method achieves an accuracy of 94.80% and Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK) score of 0.9254, and outperform many state-of-the-art methods.