New Delhi: Fintech platform BharatPe said on Tuesday that it had received approval in principle from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to operate as an online payment aggregator (PA), as it is waging a fierce court battle with its former co-founder and Managing Director Ashneer Grover over a fraud case of Rs 88.6 crore.
The company said approval in principle had been granted to Resilient Payments Private Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of Resilient Innovations Private Ltd (BharatPe).
“At BharatPe, we are committed to empowering offline merchants and kirana store owners nationwide and have already built a 1 crore merchant network in over 400 cities,” said Nalin Negi, CFO and CEO Acting BharatPe.
The tentative approval, he added, “will help propel our expansion plans and enable us to reach millions of unbanked and underserved merchants, providing digital payment acceptance solutions.”
BharatPe said he will now start fulfilling the said conditions within the prescribed time frame and launch the said PA activity online upon receipt of the final clearance from RBI.
The company is a leader in UPI offline transactions, processing over 18 million UPI transactions per month (annualized value of transactions processed of over $24 billion in payments).
The company has already facilitated the disbursement of loans close to Rs 8,500 crore to over 450,000 traders.
BharatPe said its point-of-sale (POS) business now processes more than $4 billion in payments annually on its machines.
Meanwhile, the Delhi High Court on Monday instructed Grover’s lawyer to advise his client to maintain decorum following his dismissal from the fintech company while hearing a plea filed by the company, seeking injunctions to restrain Grover and his relatives to make defamatory statements against the company.
“This social network has brought us down to this level. Ask them to maintain decorum,” Judge Navin Chawla said.