RBI greenlight: Fintech firms Juspay and Decentro and software-as-a-service company Zoho have received payment aggregator license from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).

As part of RBI’s payment aggregator framework issued in March 2020, close to 200 fintech companies had applied for the permit, with 32 entities receiving an in-principle approval. 

Notably, Ola Financial Services and PayTM Payments Services saw their applications returned.

Stripe, Zomato and Tata Pay received regulatory approval in January. Fintech majors Razorpay and Cashfree were among the six who secured the licence in December 2023.

The payments aggregator (PA) license permits companies for being payment service providers to merchants in online businesses and e-commerce firms, who can accept payment instruments from customers.

PAs aggregate the amount received from customers as part of the process, and transfer them to merchants after a stipulated time period.

Zoho becomes one of the only enterprise software as a service (SaaS) platform to receive the payments license.

Y Combinator-backed Decentro is the youngest fintech on the list, providing solutions to over 700 companies in the likes of neo-banks, marketplaces, and fintechs for banking solutions via its APIs.  Juspay, on the other hand, operates as a full-stack payment gateway for card, wallet and UPI-based transactions.

Among the ones who saw their licenses returned also include Instamojo and Freecharge among the others, as they did not fulfil the eligibility criteria. The companies have been directed to pause new merchant onboarding.

Among those who are on the yellow signal include PhonePe, Infibeam, Pine Labs and Easebuzz. They have been granted in-principal approval, while the application of Cred (Dreamplug Paytech) and PayU is still under process as per February 1 data of this year.