Open networks are a settlement problem before they are a discovery problem
Protocols like Beckn make it easy for any buyer to find any seller. The hard part is moving money, refunds and disputes between parties who do not know each other.
Amogh Suman
India's open networks are built on a simple idea: separate the app a customer uses from the business that serves them. On a network such as ONDC, which runs on the open Beckn protocol, a buyer app can find and order from a seller on any other participating app. Retail, food, mobility and financial services have all been brought onto open networks in some form.
Most discussion of open networks is about discovery: can a small seller be found by a customer on a large app? That matters. But in my view, the problem that decides whether open networks work is money.
Why money is harder on an open network
On a closed platform, one company takes the payment, holds it, pays the seller, handles the refund and settles the dispute. It sets the rules and carries the risk.
On an open network, those jobs are split among parties who may never have dealt with each other:
- Collection. Which party takes the customer's money: the buyer app or the seller app?
- Settlement. When does the seller get paid, and who holds the money in between?
- Refunds and cancellations. When an order is cancelled after the money has moved, who pays it back, and how quickly?
- Disputes. When a customer and a seller disagree, and they are on different apps, who decides?
- Fees. How are the fees owed to the buyer app, the seller app and any logistics partner calculated and collected?
Every one of these needs shared rules, shared infrastructure and trust between participants. Without them, the protocol can find a seller but cannot complete a sale people are happy with.
On a closed platform, one company carries the risk. On an open network, someone has to decide who does.
What payments people tend to miss
People from payments often see open networks as a large new source of transactions. The opportunity is real, but the work is in reconciliation. Every order produces a chain of obligations among several parties, and they all have to agree on what happened. Order status, payment status and refund status have to match across systems that were built separately.
This is the kind of problem payments infrastructure in India has solved before. UPI works because the rules for who owes what, and when, are set centrally and enforced through shared rails. Open networks need the same discipline for commerce.
What would help
- Settlement rules that are simple and published, so a small seller knows exactly when they will be paid.
- Refunds as a first-class flow, with the same speed and reliability as payments.
- A dispute process customers can find, which works the same way whichever app they started on.
- Shared data on failures, so participants can see where orders and payments break.
Discovery gets people onto an open network. Trust in how money moves keeps them there.