Adani Group has signed an agreement with fintech giant BharatPe to advance its payments ambitions, two people aware of the matter told The Head and Tale.

“An MoU has been signed between BharatPe and Adani for joint collaboration,” one of the sources said. “The agreement will cover several areas, as BharatPe has the license and Adani has the scale.”

As part of the deal, BharatPe will build a complete payment stack for Adani Group on the Adani Digital app as well as at offline merchant outlets.

BharatPe and Adani Group will deploy co-branded UPI QRs across all merchant outlets at Adani-owned Indian airports.

“These talks have been ongoing for the last three months. On Thursday (December 12), BharatPe and Adani jointly launched the pilot by placing a QR code at Ahmedabad airport,” one of the sources said.

“Adani owns captive airports, and each airport has about 2,000–3,000 merchants. Earlier, Adani had a proprietary QR code, which they are now replacing with a UPI QR in partnership with BharatPe,” another source confirmed.

The agreement is also expected to include BharatPe offering speakers (soundboxes), point-of-sale machines, and a payment gateway for Adani’s offline and online businesses.

“Commercials for the speakers are still being negotiated,” one of the sources added.

While deploying QRs is part of the initial plan, the larger objective, according to the source, is to jointly launch consumer UPI payments on the Adani One app later. 

“The Adani One app will offer UPI payments for consumers to compete with large players like PhonePe and Paytm. BharatPe will act as a technology service partner for this UPI stack, and the partnership will be facilitated via Unity Bank-BharatPe,” the source noted. 

Adani One, the ‘super app’ developed by Adani Group, is operated under Adani Enterprise Limited’s digital branch Adani Digital Labs Ltd.

There are no co-branding guidelines for the merchant acquiring side. Any offline PA/PG can deploy QR codes. But for the Adani One app to have UPI access, it will first need to qualify as a TPAP, a payments official, who wished to remain anonymous, said.

“Adani cannot play just the merchant side game – as it is limited to airports only. But the bigger question is: how is the Adani One app performing? Even if there are claims of certain users on the app, what are they coming to the app for? That’s still unclear,” the payments official added.

“Otherwise, I would say the partnership lacks significance unless they expand to the consumer payments side. The real game-changer would be if Adani starts considering a consumer UPI app.”

However, Adani will need to obtain a TPAP (third-party application provider) license from the NPCI (National Payments Corporation of India). There were market rumors a few months ago that Adani would apply for a TPAP license, but according to sources, it hasn’t applied yet. The due diligence process for obtaining a TPAP license typically takes 3–4 months.

Moreover, according to one of the sources, Adani and BharatPe may eventually enter a lending partnership. 

“The plan is that Adani might also use BharatPe’s NBFC to offer loans to its merchant partners at airports,” the source shared. Last year, Adani Group exited the NBFC space as it agreed to sell its 90% holding in Adani Capital and Adani Housing to Bain Capital.