airpay secures all three RBI payment-aggregator licences

Mumbai-based airpay Payment Services has received authorisation from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to operate across the full payment-aggregator framework, completing approvals for online (PA-O), physical/POS and QR (PA-P), and cross-border (PA-CB) services.

With this, airpay now joins a small group of regulated players that can handle domestic and international payments across online and offline merchant touchpoints on a single compliant stack. The recent list includes Razorpay, Easebuzz, PayU and Pine Labs. 

The company said the approvals will allow it to offer collections, payouts and settlements for Indian enterprises, D2C brands and SMEs selling both within India and overseas.

airpay expects the expanded licence set to drive a 30–40% increase in processing volumes over the next 6–12 months. It is also projecting over 20% of its revenue to come from cross-border flows in this period, alongside the onboarding of more than 50,000 merchants.

Founded in 2012, airpay operates in UPI acquiring, QR, payment links, PoS and merchant lifecycle management. 

With all three licences in place, the company is now positioned to support online, offline and cross-border commerce from a single regulated infrastructure as Indian businesses expand beyond domestic markets. 

This is expected to reduce settlement risk and compliance overhead for exporters, SaaS firms, subscription businesses and D2C brands targeting markets in Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.