MUMBAI: The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has granted in-principle authorisation for 32 existing payment aggregators to act as online payment aggregators, including Amazon Pay, Google India, Reliance Payment Solutions among others.
Applications are under process for an additional 18 existing payment aggregators, the RBI said. The RBI had issued circulars dated March 17, 2020 and March 31, 2021 on guidelines for Regulation of Payment Aggregators and Payment Gateways.
“All stakeholders are advised to transact with only those existing PAs (Payment Aggregators) who have been granted in-principle authorisation or whose application is currently under process,” the RBI said.It further said that stakeholders may transact with new PAs only after these entities have received authorisation under the Payment and Settlement Systems Act from the Reserve Bank of India.
Other entities that have received an in-principle nod from the RBI to operate as payment aggregators include Infibeam Avenues, Innoviti Payment Solutions, Lyra Network, NSDL Database Management, Open Financial Technologies, Pine Labs and Razorpay Software Private Limited. The RBI has returned applications of four aggregators including Axis Bank led FreeCharge, PayTM Payments and PayU Payments. PAs are entities that facilitate e-commerce sites and merchants to accept various payment instruments from customers.
They facilitate merchants to connect with acquirers. In the process, they receive payments from customers, pool and transfer them to the merchants after a time period. As per the Guidelines, online non-bank PAs (existing as on March 17, 2020) were required to apply to RBI by September 30, 2021, for seeking authorisation under the PSS Act.