Fintech firm BharatPe on Tuesday said that it has received in-principle approval from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to operate as a payment aggregator. The company will operate the platform through its subsidiary Resilient Payments, a statement said.
“This in-principle approval will help catapult our expansion plans and enable us to reach out to millions of more unbanked and underserved merchants, provide digital payment acceptance solutions and in turn, get them to be a part of the digital India story,” Nalin Negi, CFO and interim CEO, BharatPe, said.
The final approval of the RBI is subject to certain conditions and the company is working towards fulfilling the conditions, it said. The RBI in 2020 had directed online non-bank payment aggregators to seek its approval to start operations. Payment aggregators are companies enabling e-commerce sites and merchants to accept various payment instruments from the customers without the need for merchants to create a separate payment integration system.
Several companies have applied for the RBI approval to operate as payment aggregator. Although some of them have received the approval, the central bank recently directed Paytm to reapply for the licence.
Founded in 2018, the company has on-boarded a crore merchants across 400 cities and operates in Unified Payments Interface (UPI) offline transactions, processing 18 crore transactions a month. The company is backed by global investors such as Tiger Global, Dragoneer Investment Group, Steadfast Capital, Coatue Management, Ribbit Capital, Insight Partners, Steadview Capital, Beenext, Amplo, and Sequoia Capital