Food-delivery platform Zomato and international financial infrastructure provider Stripe are the latest entities to have received final approval from the regulator to operate as online payment aggregators.
While Zomato received the nod from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on January 24, Stripe got the go-ahead on January 15.
With the latest additions, 11 entities have now obtained the regulator’s final nod to operate as online aggregators in the country.
In December last year, the RBI gave payment gateways Razorpay and Cashfree final approval to operate as payment aggregators, paving the way for them to onboard new merchants, after a year-long embargo.
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Around the same time, payments major Google Pay, expense management platform Enkash and neo-banking startup Open Financial also received the regulator’s nod.
In a filing with the BSE, Zomato said on Thursday that its subsidiary Zomato Payments Pvt Ltd has secured clearance from the RBI to operate as a payment aggregator and issuer of prepaid wallets.
According to a source briefed on the matter, the Gurugram-based company is not looking to enter the fintech space as a standalone player, but is securing these financial services licences to augment offerings within its own ecosystem.
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“Internally, there have been discussions about use of the company’s payment processing infrastructure across multiple apps for consumers as well as merchants such as food-delivery, dining out, Blinkit, Hyperpure, etc,” the person said.
In 2022, Zomato had incorporated a non-banking financial company (NBFC) and had applied for a licence to offer lending products to its restaurant partners.
The same year, it also rolled out Zomato Pay, the third iteration of its dining out programme to help customers make payments and avail of discounts at partner restaurants through the Zomato app.
The central bank has been conducting multi-level checks to ensure that it selects the right companies for final approval to operate as a payment aggregator.
The RBI had also barred other payment gateways including Paytm and PayU from onboarding newer merchants and had asked both entities to resubmit their application.
