Indian Fintech Firm Cred Gets Payment Aggregator Nod from Central Bank

India’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), has granted fintech firm Cred final authorisation to operate as a payment aggregator, allowing it to directly handle merchant payment flows under RBI regulation.

What the approval allows

• Cred (via Dreamplug Paytech Solutions Pvt Ltd) can now onboard merchants, collect customer payments across instruments (UPI, credit cards, debit cards, net banking), and manage settlements and refunds on their behalf.

• The licence covers online payment aggregation, and Cred has also disclosed that it holds a prepaid payment instrument (PPI) licence from RBI, enabling stored‑value and wallet-like use cases.

• With direct control over core payment flows, Cred says users and merchants should see faster, more seamless, and more reliable payment experiences on its platform.

Scale and positioning

• Cred reported processing about ₹8.5 trillion (roughly 8.5 lakh crore) in payments for around 15 million users in the fiscal year ending March 2025.

• The company is backed by investors including Tiger Global and Peak XV (formerly Sequoia India) and has been valued at around 6–6.5 billion dollars in recent funding rounds.

• With the PA licence, Cred moves from primarily a credit‑card‑bill‑payments and rewards platform into the full‑stack payments infrastructure space, competing with players like Razorpay, PayU, Cashfree, Paytm Payments Services and others already licensed as payment aggregators.

Regulatory and strategic context

• RBI’s payment aggregator framework (issued in 2020) requires non‑bank PAs to obtain authorisation under the Payment and Settlement Systems Act, meet minimum net‑worth norms, and comply with stringent governance and security standards.​

• Cred’s group already holds multiple regulatory approvals: PPI from RBI, a corporate agency licence from IRDAI, a registered investment adviser licence from SEBI, and a TPAP licence from NPCI, signalling a strategy to build a tightly regulated, multi‑product financial services stack.

• For RBI, adding Cred to the list of fully authorised PAs continues the gradual consolidation of India’s payment ecosystem around entities that meet capital, compliance, and data‑security benchmarks, while pushing others out or into partner‑only models.