RBI Payment Aggregator Guidelines: A Guide for Startups

A payment aggregator, or PA, enables merchants to accept payments without setting up their own payment integration. It receives funds from customers, pools them and settles to merchants after a time. A payment gateway, by contrast, provides only technology to route transactions and never handles funds. The 2025 directions recognise three kinds of PA.

Banks do not need separate authorisation for PA business. Non-bank entities do, and the bar is high.

Marketplaces were the reason these rules were first written. RBI's position since 2020 has been that an e-commerce marketplace collecting money for sellers is doing PA business, and should either separate that activity and get authorised, or use an authorised PA. Selling your own goods or services and collecting your own revenue is not aggregation.

The question is simple: whose money sits in your bank account, and for how long?

Authorised PAs offer split or route settlement. The customer pays once; the PA holds funds in its escrow account and settles the seller's share to the seller and your commission to you. Each seller is onboarded as a sub-merchant with KYC. Your platform never holds seller funds, and you stay outside PA regulation.

Even as a merchant using a PA, some rules shape your product.

Platforms that collect from overseas customers for Indian sellers, or from Indian customers for overseas merchants, fall under the PA-Cross Border category. Such entities keep separate collection accounts for inward and outward flows, and transactions are subject to a per-transaction value limit. Exporters and SaaS companies usually work with an authorised PA-CB rather than seeking authorisation themselves.