The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Thursday granted a payment aggregator (PA) license to a wholly-owned subsidiary of food delivery platform Zomato, the company announced in an exchange filing. The move will allow Zomato Payment Private Limited (ZPPL) to facilitate e-commerce transactions through the platform.
“Pursuant to our earlier disclosure dated August 4, 2021, regarding the incorporation of Zomato Payments Private Limited (ZPPL), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Zomato Limited (the Company) to carry out the business, inter alia, as a payment aggregator and issuer of pre-paid payment instruments, we wish to inform that ZPPL has been granted a certificate of authorization dated January 24, 2024, from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to operate as an ‘Online Payment Aggregator’ in India with effect from January 24, 2024, as per the guidelines issued by the RBI,” the company said.
With this approval, the Deepinder Goyal-led platform has now joined the likes of Tata Pay, Razorpay and Cashfree in getting the much-awaited approval from India’s central bank. This move is all set to expand Zomato’s current role from food delivery and restaurant discovery to that of a payment aggregator.
ADVERTISEMENT
The thought behind this move is to save merchant charges attached with the services of key payment applications in India like Paytm, PhonePe and Google Pay.
Last year, the Gurugram-headquartered company had collaborated with private lender ICICI Bank to launch its own unified payment interface (UPI) named Zomato UPI. Zomato had also tied up with RBL Bank to provide credit cards to users, a facility that was later rolled back.