Fintech unicorn BharatPe has received an in-principle approval from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to operate as a payment aggregator.
Resilient Innovations Private Ltd., the Gurugram-based firm’s wholly-owned subsidiary, got RBI's authorization, the company said in a release.
"This in-principle approval will help catapult our expansion plans and enable us to reach out to millions of merchants, provide digital payment acceptance solutions,” said Nalin Negi, interim chief executive of BharatPe.
This development comes after the Sequoia and Tiger Global-backed beleaguered startup has seen four top level exits including that of former chief executive Suhail Sameer, in the last one year.
Adding to the continued batch of controversies, the company is currently underway a court case against former co-founder Ashneer Grover, alleging financial misappropriation. Grover was ousted in March last year.
Speaking about the PA nod, the company said in the statement, that the final authorization is subject to fulfilment of certain conditions, and that it will start working on meet those criteria within the given timeline.
Payment aggregators are entities that facilitate e-commerce sites and merchants to accept payment via various instruments from customers. The merchants do not need to create a separate payment integration system of their own.
RBI had issued a payment aggregator framework, mandating payment gateways to get a licence for acquiring merchants and provide them with digital payments acceptance solutions.
Some fintech firms like Razorpay, Pine Labs, Open, Cashfree, 1Pay have already received RBI approval for payment aggregation in the last few months. Over 185 fintech enterprises and startups which had submitted their proposals for a payment aggregator licence.
BharatPe, founded in 2018, began by launching the first interoperable UPI code. It serves more than 1 crore merchants across 400+ cities.
