Paytm's comeback trail looks open, but regulatory concerns remain

On August 5, Antfin, the Chinese investment arm of Alibaba, exited Paytm completely. A week later, on August 12, Paytm Payments Services Ltd (PPSL), the payments arm of One97 Communications (OCL), secured an in-principle nod from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to function as an online payment aggregator (PA).

 

This approval marked the end of a two-year wait, during which PPSL was barred from onboarding new merchants. The delay has caused the firm to lose ground in the fast-growing online merchant space, where rivals such as Razorpay and Cashfree Payments, despite facing their own temporary embargoes, have managed to