Overview
- The company announced in a BSE filing that it received in‑principle approval from the Reserve Bank of India for a Payment Aggregator‑Physical (PA‑P) licence on Tuesday, May 26, enabling formal entry into offline merchant acquiring.
- MobiKwik’s shares rose about 7.5–8% intraday after the announcement, reflecting investor optimism about new monetisation routes from physical payments and device rollouts.
- The firm says it already serves roughly 4.9 million merchants through UPI QR, Soundbox and EDC machines and plans to sharply increase Soundbox and EDC deployments to meet its FY28 goal of 10x merchant-business growth.
- Recent regulatory wins stack up: Zaakpay received a PA‑O (online) licence about a year ago and MobiKwik secured an NBFC licence in April, which together clear the way for payments, device revenue and lending products to be offered in tandem.
- Legal and compliance risks persist because Bengaluru Police registered two FIRs related to the Mobikwik Xtra P2P product, and the PA‑P approval is still subject to final RBI clearance and operational compliance before full rollout.