After over a year of waiting, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) granted its final approval for at least six payment aggregator licences on December 19, thus lifting the ban on entities such as RazorPay and Cashfree Payments for acquiring new merchants.

• The final nod for the payment aggregator licence has come for Razorpay, Cashfree Payments, Open Financial, EnKash, Google Pay and Paymate India, sources told businessline.
• The licences comes over a year after the central bank in December 2022 asked platforms which has in-principal approvals for a payment aggregator licence such as RazorPay, Cashfree Payments, PayU, PineLabs, Paytm and Stripe, among others, to stop on-boarding new merchants till additional documents and audit reports are submitted and a final licence is awarded.
• Both RazorPay and Cashfree Payments said that following the receipt of the final approval, they will now be able to on-board new merchants on their payments gateway.