The Reserve Bank of India publishes a list of 32 entities, including Google Pay and Amazon Pay, that can act as online payment aggregators in the country
The Reserve Bank of India on Wednesday published a list of 32 entities, including Alphabet Inc.'s Google Pay, Amazon.com Inc.'s Amazon Pay …
Context & Ripple Effects
This list is the payoff of a licensing drive the Reserve Bank of India began tightening in late 2022, when it refused One 97's payment aggregator application, telling Paytm's parent to fix its foreign direct investment structure before reapplying. Publishing 32 cleared names now draws a hard line between who may legally onboard online merchants in India and who cannot.
Google Pay and Amazon Pay clearing the bar matters because both were part of the consortia circling Indian digital payments since 2021, and the list effectively hands the US platforms a regulatory head start over their biggest domestic rival while One 97 remains unlicensed.
First-order effects
- The 32 named entities — including Alphabet's Google Pay and Amazon's Amazon Pay — can operate as online payment aggregators immediately, giving them legal standing to sign up Indian merchants.
- Paytm's parent One 97 is conspicuously absent, so it must keep operating under its earlier constraint: comply with FDI guidelines and reapply before touching merchant acquisition at scale.
Second-order effects
- Indian online merchants choosing an aggregator face a two-tier market: licensed US-backed rails versus a Paytm that must restructure ownership first, pushing merchant volume toward Google Pay and Amazon Pay in the interim.
- One 97's path back runs through unwinding foreign shareholding complexity — the same structural issue that resurfaced when China's Ant Group later sold out of Paytm ahead of its eventual in-principle approval.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, India's payment aggregation layer consolidates around regulator-vetted gatekeepers, with foreign-ownership compliance functioning as a de facto entry barrier that shapes which platforms control merchant acquiring.
The trend: India is converting payment aggregation into a formally licensed regime where ownership structure, not just product reach, decides which global and domestic platforms get to intermediate merchant payments.