BharatPe Group has received in principle authorisation from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to operate as an online payment aggregator.
The company shared that the in principle approval has been awarded to Resilient Payments Private Ltd , a 100 per cent owned subsidiary of Resilient Innovations Private Ltd (BharatPe).
Speaking on the development, Nalin Negi, CFO and interim CEO, BharatPe, said “We are really excited to receive the in principle approval for the Online Payment Aggregator License and are thankful to the regulators for entrusting their faith on us. At BharatPe, we have been committed to empowering offline merchants and kirana store owners in the country and have already built a network of 1 crore merchants across 400+ cities. 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.”
Financial inclusion
The final authorisation is subject to fulfilment of certain conditions. BharatPe will now commence work on fulfilling these conditions within the prescribed timeline and launch the online PA business upon the receipt of the final authorisation from RBI.
BharatPe was founded in 2018 with the vision of making financial inclusion a reality for Indian merchants. In 2018, it launched UPI interoperable QR code, the first zero MDR payment acceptance service. In 2020, post-Covid, BharatPe also launched a card acceptance terminal – BharatSwipe. Currently serving 1 crore merchants across 400+ cities, the company is a leader in UPI offline transactions, processing over 18 crore UPI transactions per month (annualised transaction processed value of over $24 billion in payments).
Disbursement of loans
The company said it has facilitated the disbursement of loans totalling close to ₹8500 crore to over 450,000 merchants. BharatPe’s POS business processes payments of over $4 billion annually on its machines. BharatPe has raised over $650 million in equity till date.
The company’s list of investors includes Tiger Global, Dragoneer Investment Group, Steadfast Capital, Coatue Management, Ribbit Capital, Insight Partners, Steadview Capital, Beenext, Amplo, and Sequoia Capital.
In June 2021, the company announced the acquisition of PAYBACK India, the country’s largest multi-brand loyalty program company with 100 million+ members. In October 2021, the consortium of Centrum Financial Services Ltd (Centrum) and BharatPe, was issued a Small Finance Bank (SFB) license by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). BharatPe also entered the Buy Now Pay Later segment with the launch of postpe in October 2021.