Zoho, the Chennai-based SaaS giant, is making a major push into fintech with the rapid expansion of its unified payments suite—Zoho Payments—and the launch of advanced payment solutions, including proprietary Point-of-Sale (POS) devices. This innovation not only strengthens Zoho’s presence in B2B and SMB digital finance but could also radically alter how Indian businesses integrate commerce, messaging, and payments, especially if seamlessly connected with its fast-growing messaging platform, Arattai.
Zoho Payments: Platform, Products, and Strategy
Zoho Payments is a unified payment aggregator and gateway, fully licensed by the RBI, that offers businesses a seamless way to accept both online and in-person payments. It supports multiple options: UPI, NEFT, RTGS, IMPS, credit/debit cards, and net banking. Their system is natively embedded into its finance apps—Zoho Books, Billing, Invoice, and Inventory—allowing SMEs to manage sales, invoices, payments, and financial reconciliations from a single interface. This eliminates common headaches like delayed settlements, manual errors, or data-loss between third-party apps.
A key differentiator is its tightly integrated hardware: Their new smart Android POS device comes with touchscreen navigation, an inbuilt printer, support for EMV cards, UPI QR codes, and sound box confirmations, as well as PCI DSS and RBI-compliant security. The device allows real-time syncing, remote terminal management, and smooth handling of multi-location businesses. For India’s retail, hospitality, services, and field sales sectors, this means faster billing, easier collections, and instant digital or printed receipts.
Even as our Arattai team is scaling up and fine tuning the product, our other product teams are hard at work.
— Sridhar Vembu (@svembu) October 7, 2025
Last year Zoho became an RBI authorized payment aggregator in India and launched our online payment solutions. We are now deepening our fintech footprint by unveiling… pic.twitter.com/xRImMnChm7
Partnership with NPCI’s NBBL and the Bharat Bill Payment System
They also partnered with NPCI’s Bharat Bill Payment System (BBPS)—run by NPCI Bharat BillPay Limited (NBBL)—to bring standardized invoice presentment, payment confirmations, and automated bulk payment reconciliation. Businesses can finance unpaid invoices via the TReDS platform through BBPS, enhancing working capital and credit access.
The BBPS integration enables multi-mode acceptance (UPI, card, netbanking), instant notifications, and a unified dashboard for B2B and B2C payments, catering to India’s accelerating digital payments ecosystem.
Market Leaders and Competition
India’s payment aggregator space is led by entrenched players like Razorpay, Paytm, PayU, Cashfree, Airpay, and CCAvenue, who offer multi-modal payment gateway solutions and dominate merchant acceptance. Zoho’s edge lies in being an end-to-end business app suite provider—with payments, accounting, CRM, inventory, HR, and communication, all under one login—enabling bundled pricing, deep workflow integration, and holistic data management.
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The Power of Integrating Payments with Arattai
If they merges Payments and POS with Arattai, the implications for Indian SMBs and even consumer payments would be profound:
- Businesses could chat with customers on Arattai and send payment requests or invoices that customers can pay instantly within the chat.
- SMEs could execute conversational commerce, where support, negotiation, billing, and receipt happen in one place, improving closure rates and service quality.
- Arattai’s “open, interoperable” ethos (unlike WhatsApp’s closed ecosystem) means merchants could interact with multiple platforms (akin to UPI messaging and payments) and not be locked into a single silo.
- Rural and Tier-2/3 businesses would gain secure digital communication bundled with native-language payment and billing tools, addressing a critical gap in India’s digital transformation.
Read this: Zoho Is the Only Company in the World That Can Take On Microsoft, Says Sridhar Vembu
Summary:
With Zoho Payments and its tightly-coupled POS devices, it is poised to become a force in digital commerce and SMB fintech—offering an indigenous, integrated alternative to global payment giants. The partnership with NPCI’s NBBL further assures credibility and reach. As they explores linking payments to Arattai, it could create a uniquely Indian blueprint for unified business communication, billing, and financial empowerment—boosting adoption and streamlining workflows at every level of the economy.
