Fintech firm PhonePe on Friday said that it has decided to wind down its account aggregator (AA) business and surrender its NBFC-AA licence to the Reserve Bank of India.
The company had launched its AA services in 2023 through its wholly-owned subsidiary PhonePe Technology Services (PTSPL). The company said it had registered around 50 million customers on its AA platform in two years. “However, due to competing priorities, we have not been able to onboard as many financial information providers (FIPs) to our platform as we would have liked,” it said. It will reach out to its AA user base and inform them about the decision to wind down.
The Walmart group company will now partner other AAs in the market. The AA licence allows companies to obtain financial information of users with their consent and share it with banking and financial institutions for offering financial services such as loan, credit card, etc. PhonePe said it had acquired the AA licence in 2023 when there weren’t a lot of players in the space. It added that the growth of the AA ecosystem is important for financial inclusion in India.
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PhonePe dominates the UPI ecosystem and has also entered other financial services verticals like credit and insurance. Recently, its e-commerce arm Pincode entered quick commerce. In 2019-20, Reliance Industries and Aditya Birla Group gave up their NBFC-AA licences. Later in 2024, Zomato announced it would surrender its online payment aggregator licence.
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