Groww Pay, the UPI payments platform of Fintech unicorn broking firm Groww, has received in-principle authorisation from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to operate as a Payments Aggregator (PA).

According to the latest RBI data, the online payment aggregator licence was granted on April 29. This licence will allow the company to enable e-commerce transactions through its UPI app -- Groww Pay. The PA license allows fintech companies to open direct payment channels to merchants, reducing overhead costs and gaining more control over payment flows.

Launched in July last year, the broking firm rolled out UPI payment services through the Groww Pay Private Limited feature to expand its financial services.

The company obtained its third-party application provider (TPAP) license last year and provided the services in collaboration with banking partner Yes Bank.

Their payment application mainly focuses on bill payment services such as electricity and water bills, as well as DTH recharge among other options. Additionally, the application provides options for loan and credit card repayments.

Backed by Tiger Global, Groww has been exploring opportunities in credit and payments to retain its existing customers and attract new ones. Before entering payments, it had introduced lending on its platform and secured an NBFC licence.

Groww has been actively expanding its financial services offerings. In July last year, it launched Unified Payments Interface-based services through Groww Pay, enabling peer-to-peer payments as well as transactions with merchants via QR code scanning. It also ventured into lending with a non-banking finance company licence and is into asset management through the Groww AMC business.

RBI has approved multiple online payment gateway companies to be PAs since late last year, including Groww-backed identity verification startup DigiO, PayU, CRED, Mswipe, Razorpay, Cashfree, Decentro, Zoho, CC Avenue, Tata Pay, Google Pay, and EnKash, among others.

Meanwhile, Groww has registered INR 1,277 crore in revenue in FY23, a huge 266% surge.

In October last year, Groww surpassed its archrival Zerodha for the first time in terms of active users. Further, Groww ended 2023 with 7.5 million monthly active users whereas Zerodha and AngelOne had 6.7 million and 5.3 million MAUs, respectively.

The Zerodha rival reported a net profit of INR 448.7 crore in FY23 against INR 239 crore in net loss in the previous fiscal year.

Last week, Groww’s Mutual Fund also received SEBI’s approval to launch the Nifty Non-Cyclical Consumer Index Fund through a new fund offering (NFO).

Most recently, PayU received in-principle approval from RBI to operate as a payment aggregator. Besides PayU and Groww, fintech firms Razorpay, Cashfree, Open, EnKash, Juspay, and Infibeam have received PA licences from the apex banking body.

Article Source – IANS