payment aggregators: Juspay, Zoho, Decentro secure RBI nod for payment aggregator business

Even at a time when the Reserve Bank of India is tightening controls over the fintech industry, fintech startups are getting the regulatory nod to operate as payment aggregators.

Two fintech startups Juspay and Decentro have received the final licence to operate as payment aggregators on February 6. They will join the likes of Razorpay, Cashfree, Zomato and others who got the licence earlier.

While Juspay operated as a payment gateway running a technology stack for ecommerce payments, Decentro is a technology company that enables ecommerce and other consumer facing players offer financial services like lending, KYC and other services .

ET reported December 14 that Juspay, which was working with other payment aggregators as a technology stack, wants to enter the payments space directly and expand operations outside India too.

Software as a service startup Zoho also got the payment aggregator licence on February 2. Zoho is the first enterprise Saas player to get the payment aggregator nod from the RBI.

“The regulator is issuing full licences one after the other. We are expecting more players to get the final nod over the next two months,” said a senior executive at a payments company.

The RBI had released the first guidelines on payment aggregator licences in March 2020. Razorpay, Cashfree, Open were the first set of players to get the regulatory nod in December last year. Zomato, DigiO, Google, and Tata Digital are the other major players to get the payments licence.