BharatPe May Act as a Payment Aggregator, Gets In-principle Approval from RBI Days after CEO Suhail Sameer Resigned
January 14, 2023, New Delhi: Unicorn Bharatpay will now join other fintechs like Open, Infibeam, Cashfree, PaySharp and Worldline Payments to act as a payment aggregator as it has received in-principle approval from the Reserve Bank of India.
RBI gave in-principle approval to Resilient Payments Pvt Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of Resilient Innovations Pvt Ltd, the company that operates the BharatPay platform.
Nalin Negi, interim chief executive of BharatPe, said the in-principle approval will help drive its expansion plans and enable the company to reach millions of merchants and provide digital payment acceptance solutions. The banking regulator’s finalization is subject to the fulfillment of certain conditions.
BharatPe has been allowed to operate as a payment aggregator at a time when it is battling a lawsuit against its ousted co-founder Ashneer Grover and after witnessing several high-profile exits, including its CEO Suhail Sameer.
The fintech will start work to meet the conditions within the stipulated timeline and start its online payment aggregator business after receiving final approval, it added. BharatPe said it has already built a network of 10 million merchants in over 400 cities.
End-to-end payment solutions provider Hitachi Payment Services was the second company to receive in-principle approval from the central bank for a payment aggregator license.
Payment Aggregator Framework
The RBI came out with the Payment Aggregator Framework in March 2020, according to which, all payment gateways need to be licensed to acquire merchants and provide payment services to them.
More than 185 fintechs, including Cred, Razorpay, Paytm and PhonePe, submitted proposals for the license.
However, the Vijay Shekhar Sharma-led digital payments company did not get approval from the central bank and was asked to reapply for the license in four months or 120 days in November.
Meanwhile, fintech platforms such as Pine Labs, Stripe, MSWipe and Innovity have already received RBI’s in-principle approval for payment aggregator licenses.
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