Mobikwik’s Zaakpay In As Payment Aggregator As RBI Nods Approval (Image: Zaakpay.com)
Mobikwik’s Zaakpay, the payment gateway, has received Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) in-principal approval to function as a aggregator for payments and to onboard new merchants. Last year, the RBI had not approved Zaakpay’s licence as a payment aggregator. One of the reasons for this rejection was the payment gateway’s failure to cross the net worth criterion prescribed by the RBI, reported the ET.
During the latter half of the year, RBI allowed payment gateways to apply for regulatory approval as, keeping the licence-less gateways off the system would have led to disruptions in the system.
Co-founder of Mobikwik, Upasana Taku, who is also the chairperson and chief operating officer, said on this, “we are happy to welcome new merchants onto the Zaakpay platform.”
This approval for Zaakpay comes amidst the Central Bank’s prohibition on onboarding new merchants by Razorpay, Cashfree, PayU and Paytm, the four top payment gateways. With the changing picture, Pine Lab’s payment gateway – Plural and PhonePe, are building partnership to make a hold in the budding online merchants payment platforms, ET said.
Acceptance of payments through modes such as cards-credit and debit, net banking, unified payments interface (UPI) and digital wallets are made possible through Zaakpay. As a part of its product suite, online checkouts, payment links and payments which are based on quick-response (QR)-code are also there.
Mobikwik, the Gurugram based quarterly profit for the quarter that ended on September 30 registered a revenue of Rs 208 crore, which is a rise of 17 percent over the last quarter. The profit, in total stood at Rs. 5 crore. The total revenue for half the year was Rs 385 crore, with Rs. 8 crore total profit.
Mobikwik’s Bipin Preet Singh, the cofounder and chief executive, said that 60 percent of the quarterly came from the company’s credit offerings, which was 51 percent in the month of March. Payment offerings accounted for the rest. The company also has a hand at mutual funds distribution and provides Xtra, a peer-to-peer lending product. It is involved in providing personal loans, pay-later and credit under Zip franchise. It has 140 million users, with almost 35 million active users, which is a quarter, the fintech company said.
