RBI Gives Green Signal To Zomato To Operate As Online Payment Aggregator (Photo by Rubaitul Azad on Unsplash)

Zomato Payments, the subsidiary of popular online food delivery platform Zomato, has received the certificate of authorisation from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to operate as an online payment aggregator. According to an exchange filing by Zomato, the authorisation came into effect on January 24, 2024.

This significant approval will permit Zomato to facilitate e-commerce transactions through its platform. “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,” said the company in an exchange filing, as quoted by CNBC.

In May 2023, the food delivery giant partnered with ICICI Bank to unveil its very own unified payments interface (UPI) offering called Zomato UPI. With this move, Zomato aimed to reduce dependency on other payment gateways, including Phonepe and Google Pay, while placing orders. Moneycontrol mentioned in a report that this move allowed Zomato to save on merchant charges that come with payments made through third-party apps. The platform also had a partnership with RBL Bank for its co-branded Edition credit cards. However, this partnership was terminated in 2023.

Recently, the RBI has also granted a payment aggregator (PA) licence to Tata Payments. It is the digital payments app under Tata Digital. Apart from Tata payments, Groww-backed identity verification startup DigiO has also received a licence recently.