Razorpay FTX26: Design
Reimagine Fintech in the age of AI
Every year, Razorpay hosts FTX. And every year, the bar moves.
FTX26 wasn’t about moving the bar. It was about resetting it entirely.
India’s most exclusive fintech summit. 1000+ founders, CXOs, policymakers, and global leaders. Three stages: Future of Money, Future of Growth, Future of Tech. First-of-its-kind AI Agentic payment products, launched live on stage with zero scope for error. And behind all of it, a team that owned every surface, every screen, every pixel.
Before the Event Is the Event.
Most people see the final day. The stage lighting hitting perfectly. The LED wall running flawlessly. The keynote transitioning at exactly the right beat. What they don’t see is the two months before that, the planning architecture that made any of it possible.
FTX26’s design scope was, by any measure, enormous. Space design across The LaLit Ashok Bengaluru. Three stage environments. The Centre of Excellence. The Sprint Area. All keynotes. 10+ UI and launch videos. Three product landing pages. Branding. Collaterals. Mementos. A 40x100 feet LED wall running the Sprint26 website. And unveiled a new design language, Razorsense.
Two months of production at this scale does something to a team. There’s a week where everything clicks and the energy in the room feels like nothing can go wrong. There’s a week where three things break simultaneously, a brief changes overnight, and multiple people are running on four hours of sleep. There’s a day two weeks out where someone on the team looks at everything still left to do and the math doesn’t add up.
This is not unusual. This is the process.
The Communication Design team has done this every year. Every year they’ve raised the bar. FTX26 was our most ambitious edition yet and our best. Those two outcomes aren’t unrelated. Growth happens at the edge of difficulty, and this team has learned to turn pressure into precision.
That doesn’t happen by chance. It’s the result of years of building the right culture. The role of leaders isn’t to solve every problem, but to keep the team’s confidence steady while they solve them. Conviction is contagious.
To manage that scale, we structured the work like a product: parallel tracks, clear ownership, shared vision. Daily creative briefs and weekly cross-track reviews kept small misalignments from becoming expensive rebuilds.
Great events aren’t assembled in the final weeks. They’re decided by the principles established on day one.
Here is what went into designing Razorpay’s most ambitious event.
The language comes first
Before a single stage panel was designed or a frame of keynote animation was made, we had to answer one question: what does this era of Razorpay look and feel like?
The answer was RazorSense.
FTX26 marked the first full-scale expression of Razorpay’s new design language. RazorSense is a design language for the AI era that acts, reacts, and reasons with you.
Its launch demanded more than consistency, it demanded primacy. Before a single stage was built or keynote designed, the language had to define the system. Every experience, from the environment to the films and digital surfaces, was shaped by RazorSense from the inside out.
That’s why FTX26 felt intentional, not assembled.
The Space
We started with the space. And we started in December.
Three stages at The LaLit Ashok, Bengaluru: The Fintech Stage, The Tech Stage, and The Startup Stage. Entry arch, pathway branding, registration booth, signage, common areas, every inch of the venue was a design decision. We partnered with Brandaid and TSF for execution, but the ideation, strategy, and full design direction were led in-house by the comm design team. Nothing was outsourced to gut feel.
The crown jewel was the Centre of Excellence: a dedicated AI demo zone anchored by a 40x100 feet LED wall. What went up on that wall was the Sprint26 website, our B2B interaction site with 100+ product launches, rendered into a moving, breathing spatial experience. It became the most stunning spot of the event. People stopped. People stared.
The spatial design wasn’t decoration. It was language.
Launches
Four major product launches on the main stage: Agentic Dashboard, Agentic Payments, Agents Studio, and RazorSense itself. All live. All real-time. All with zero margin for failure. The comm design team designed every keynote uniquely while holding Razorsense as the core. Stage and screen coordination, live feed design, display timing , every detail was thought through weeks before the day.
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Add to that 10+ UI videos for social launches, 3 landing pages for the agentic product suite, all launch films, all event films, halo LED content, motion graphics, and the Sprint website’s LED rendition. All designed in-house. All shipped in rocket speed.
Powered with AI
None of this was possible at this speed without AI as a genuine production partner. Over the past year, the comm design team has been building that muscle: workflows, custom tools, image generation pipelines with visual consistency, moodboard systems, cinematic-quality production at 10x speed. FTX26 was where that investment paid off at full scale. AI didn’t replace the craft. It multiplied it.
RazorSense: Design Language for AI era
Everything represented with a new design language on stage, to an audience of 1000+ founders, CXOs, and global leader, while that language is simultaneously alive across every surface in the room is a different kind of pressure. The language had to prove itself in real time. It did.
The Keynotes: Designing for Live
Designing a keynote is not the same as designing slides.
A slide deck is a document. A keynote is a performance. The difference is live. Every transition, every animation state, every product reveal has to land in a room, in front of 1000 people, once. You don’t get a second take. You don’t get a post-event fix.
For FTX26, the keynote design worked backward from the live moment. What is the exact frame on screen when this announcement is made? What is the light state in the room at that moment? What does the presenter feel under that lighting, with that transition happening behind them? These aren’t afterthoughts. They’re the brief.
Four major AI product launches happened on that stage: Agentic Dashboard, Agentic Payments, Agents Studio, and Razorsense itself. Each had a different product story, a different visual language phase, a different audience impact requirement. Agentic Dashboard needed to communicate scale and intelligence. Agents Studio needed to feel accessible and buildable. Razorsense needed to be felt, not explained, because a design language introduced through a verbose explainer slide defeats the point.
The keynote team spent weeks in pre-production. Not polishing. Stress-testing. Running the transitions with the audio team. Confirming states with the product team. Checking presenter flow. The final day had no surprises because every surprise had been surfaced and resolved in the weeks before it.
Agentic Landing Pages
Three landing pages for the agentic product suite, built and shipped in parallel to everything else happening for the event.
Each page had a distinct job. The Agentic Payments page opened with a bold declaration: India’s first AI-Powered Conversational Payment Experience. The design framing was intentional, this isn’t an incremental product update. The page needed to communicate a category shift. It did it without a wall of copy. It let the product UI do the talking, surfacing the core value propositions through live dashboard states: predict cashflow 7 days ahead with 85%+ accuracy, recover 25%+ abandoned carts with Voice AI, fight disputes with a 70%+ win rate.
The Mental Model for 100+ People Collaboration
At peak production, FTX26 involved over 100 people in collaborative touchpoints. Design team, product team, marketing, tech, spatial partners, keynote presenters, AV teams, logistics. Getting a vision from one leader’s head into the hands of 100 people without it degrading along the way is not a project management problem. It’s a communication design problem.
The mental model that works: compression, not expansion.
Every time a brief moves from one team to the next, the natural instinct is to add context. More slides. More caveats. More “just to make sure you understand.” What that does is create decision surface. Every piece of added context is a fork in the road where the receiving team can make a different interpretation call.
The discipline is the opposite. Compress the brief to its irreducible minimum. One vision reference that everything is checked against. One decision-maker per track. One sync per week where drift is caught, not where decisions are made.
Most of the decisions at FTX26 were made before production started. The production phase was execution, not exploration. That’s not a constraint on creativity. That’s what makes creativity survive at scale.
What Leadership Actually Means at This Scale
There is a version of design leadership that operates from 30,000 feet. Sets the vision, delegates the execution, reviews at the end. It looks confident. It is, in most large organizations, how things are done.
It doesn’t produce world-class work.
FTX26 required the opposite. Every surface of this event had implications across every other surface. The spatial tone had to match the keynote tone had to match the landing page tone had to match the video tone. The only way to ensure that coherence is to be close enough to every piece to feel when something is drifting off.
That kind of proximity requires multidisciplinary range. If you can’t read a spatial brief with the same fluency as a motion design brief, you can’t catch the drift. You can only be told about it. And being told about it means you’re always a step behind.
The range this team carries: space, print, digital, motion, web, video, keynote, interactive, is what allowed FTX26 to be held to one standard across every format. Not because one person made every decision. Because one person could see every decision clearly enough to know when it was right and when it wasn’t.
Leadership at this level isn’t about control for control’s sake. It’s about vision integrity. The details aren’t distractions. They are the vision.
The Impact
1000+ attendees. Three stages. Four landmark AI product launches. A new design language unveiled at full scale. A 40x100 feet LED wall running a live website. Three landing pages live on day one. 10+ UI videos in production. And a team that delivered all of it in two months, end to end, in-house.
FTX26 didn’t just set a new standard for Razorpay. It set a new standard for what an in-house comm design team can own.
This is what it looks like when design stops being a support function and starts being a force.
A massive shoutout to the Razorpay Communication Design team, for surviving two months of creative chaos with (mostly) their sanity intact. To our biggest partner in all this the brilliant Marketing team, for turning bold ideas into reality and making sure they reached the world. To our incredible Razorpay Events team and partners for executing every detail with precision, Product Design and Engineering for pulling off multiple impossibles. None of this happens without all of you. To our founders and leaders, who kept raising the bar (and occasionally our blood pressure).
Here’s to doing it all over again at FTX27.
