Fintech platform CRED has received in principle approval for payment aggregator license. This was first reported by the Economic Times.
As per TechCrunch, the Bengaluru based start-up received the license this week. CRED primarily focusses on “reward-based credit card payments app”. However, with the company getting the payment aggregator license, can now focus on merchant payments as well. As of now, CRED Pay is run by the company in partnership with other payment companies. With the Payment Aggregator license arriving, the company can transfer and settle funds themselves.
A Payment Aggregator basically helps in facilitating online payments for customers and businesses via several options including credit cards and UPI. As per the RBI, “Payment Aggregator (PAs) are entities that facilitate e-commerce sites and merchants to accept various payment instruments from the customers for completion of their payment obligations without the need for merchants to create a separate payment integration system of their own.”
Without a payment aggregator license, a fintech platform relies on third party application provider. A third party application provider helps UPI based apps to do UPI based trnsactions.
The RBI takes six months to grant the license. Some companies that recently got payment aggregator license includes CCAvenue, Innoviti Payments, Razorpay, Cashfree Payments, Open Financial, EnKash, Google Pay and Paymate India. As per the Economic Times report, CRED didn’t comment on the development.
Read: RBI Issues Draft Guidelines on Payment Aggregators
Launched six years ago with the intent to help people pay credit card bills, CRED has also expanded to offering loans. One of the features they offer is, “CRED's credit card spend tracking and management feature which provided the user with analysis of spend tracking and efficiency of usage of the card.”
