The Reserve Bank of India (RBI), on January 24, granted the certificate of authorisation to Zomato Payments, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Zomato Limited, to operate as an online payment aggregator. 

The food delivery platform announced in an exchange filing on Thursday that 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.

With RBI’s nod, Zomato has now joined Tata Pay, Razorpay, and Cashfree, among others, in the club of companies that have managed to secure the much-awaited payments licence.

As a payment aggregator, Zomato would be able to facilitate payment transactions on e-commerce websites and mobile apps through its platform without merchants needing to create their payment interface.

Zomato also partnered with ICICI Bank last year to launch its own unified payments interface (UPI) offering – Zomato UPI – eliminating the need for users to navigate to other payment apps while placing orders on Zomato.