Zomato Payments Gets RBI's Nod to Operate as Online Payment Aggregator

Zomato Payments, a wholly owned subsidiary of Zomato Limited, has received the certificate of authorisation from the Reserve Bank of India to operate as an online payment aggregator. In an exchange filing, the food delivery platform said the central bank has allowed it to carry out the business as payment aggregator and issuer of pre-paid payment instruments with effect from January 24, 2024.

Last year, Zomato had joined hands with ICICI Bank to launch its own unified payments interface (UPI) offering -- Zomato UPI. The feature was offered to select users and did not involve a KYC process. It eliminated the need for users to navigate to other payment apps, such as Google Pay, Paytm, and PhonePe, while placing orders on Zomato.

The company said that the feature is a safe way to complete transactions and one can secure their account by adding a security PIN to it.

"Zomato has a large set of customers that frequently use UPI to make payments for their food orders. We are providing a facility (as technology partner to ICICI) for customers to create a UPI id on Zomato app so that they can make payments seamlessly (without the need to switch apps)," a company spokesperson said last year.

Earlier this month, TaTa Payments and Bengaluru-based identity verification startup DigiO secured the payment aggregator (PA) licence from the RBI.

(Source: Business Today)