New Delhi, Dec 19 (IANS): Digital payment startups Razorpay and Cashfree on Tuesday announced that they received final authorisation from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to operate as payments aggregators (PA).

"Razorpay has now received the final authorisation from the Reserve Bank of India @RBI to operate as a Payment Aggregator (PA) under the Payment Settlements Act, 2007. We are delighted to be one of the first Payment Gateways to have received the final PA license from RBI," Razorpay wrote on X.

Cashfree also confirmed the development on X, saying: "We have received the final authorisation to operate as a payment aggregator by the RBI. We are thrilled to announce that we are now onboarding businesses on Cashfree Payment Gateway".

Neobanking fintech Open has also received final approval from RBI to function as a payment aggregator.

This comes a year after the RBI barred companies like Razorpay, Cashfree, and Stripe from accepting new merchants until they receive final approval for a PA licence.

PAs are entities that allow e-commerce sites and merchants to accept numerous instruments from customers to fulfil their payment commitments without the merchants having to build their own systems. PAs collect payments from customers, pool them, then send them to merchants.