Download Groww’s IPO prospectus here.
Stock broking platform Groww has quietly surrendered its online payment aggregator (PA) licence to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). Groww Pay Services Private Limited, a subsidiary of the company, had its PA licence cancelled in January 2026, according to the RBI’s website. The licence allowed the company to onboard new merchants to its platform, instead of relying on other payment aggregators and payment gateways.
Why it matters: This means that Groww forfeited its PA licence in less than two years of obtaining it and barely two months after going public.
The lack of any public disclosure from the company should raise some eyebrows. As a listed company, Groww is expected to keep the stock exchanges informed of any material developments concerning its subsidiaries. The cancellation of a licence issued by the country’s banking regulator would, by most definitions, qualify as a material event. Yet no such regulatory filing appears to have been made since its public listing in November 2025.
Furthermore, there is no mention anywhere in its initial public offering (IPO) documents, including the DRHP, updated IPO prospectus and the final red herring prospectus, that Groww was planning to surrender the licence or shutter its PA business altogether.
What drove Groww to surrender its PA licence?
“Groww’s payment aggregator arm was bleeding cash. The PA business did not make much sense to begin with, given that the platform works with other payment aggregators and payment gateways,” founder and CEO of a rival stockbroking platform told MediaNama.
According to Groww’s RHP, its payment aggregator arm posted a net loss of 14 crore in the fiscal year ended March 2025, up from a loss of Rs 9.4 crore in FY24.
Groww Pay Services Private Limited was incorporated in 2021. According to the RBI’s Guidelines of Payment Aggregators and Payment Gateways, payment aggregators are required to maintain a net worth of Rs 15 crore at the time of application and subsequently attain a net worth of Rs 25 crore by the end of the third financial year of grant of authorisation.
Not the first listed company to surrender a PA licence: With this, Groww has joined Zomato, which surrendered its PA licence to the RBI in May 2024, citing that the firm does not see a business in the payments space as commercially viable. The foodtech company had first submitted a disclosure for the PA licence in August 2021 and had obtained it from the RBI in January 2024.
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