On November 12, 2025, just a day after Pine Labs’ INR 3,900 Cr IPO closed for subscription, the fintech giant announced it had secured all three key payment licenses from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI): Payment Aggregator (PA), Payment Gateway, and Cross-Border Payments.

This “trifecta” makes Pine Labs the first Indian fintech to hold comprehensive regulatory approvals across the entire spectrum of digital payments, positioning it as a full-stack payments provider at a critical juncture.

The timing couldn’t have been better, as the company’s shares listed on November 14, 2025 at a 9.5% premium and ended the first trading day nearly 14% higher than issue price. Whether this was a coincidence or a planned announcement is unclear, but it gives Pine Labs a big edge over the others.

While Pine Labs, which was founded in 1998, began its journey as a point of sales (PoS) solutions provider, it has morphed into a multipronged fintech player, with verticals in payments, loyalty and rewards, API banking, online payments and more. It’s also aiming for a bigger share of the B2B cross-border payments wave that’s sweeping the fintech industry.

On the back of this diversification, Pine Labs showed a turnaround in Q1 FY26, turning profitable and posting a net profit of INR 4.8 Cr. Its FY25 losses stood at INR 145 Cr. It saw a 28.5% YOY growth in FY25 in its topline at INR 2,274 Cr as against INR 1,770 Cr in FY24.

At that revenue scale, Pine Labs listed at an EBITDA multiple of 68x. This was one of the sticking points before the IPO, and why some brokerages cautioned investors against any short-term bets. But does Pine Labs have the edge over its rivals in the long run?

The Evolution From PoS To Fintech

Founded in 1998 by Lokvir Kapoor, Rajul Garg, and Tarun Upadhyay, Pine Labs began as a modest provider of point-of-sale (PoS) solutions for merchants in India.

Over the years, it has transformed into a global fintech player, serving over 1.5 million merchants across Asia and the Middle East with an integrated platform that encompasses PoS hardware, payment gateways, API banking, digital lending, and loyalty programs. As of FY25, the company claimed to have processed more than 5.7 Bn transactions annually.

Pine Labs has come a long way from just being viewed as a Point of Sale (PoS) machine business to a newer version, Pine Labs 2.0, where the offerings have multiplied to now include bill payments, issuing and acquiring business, digital payments, and payments processing.

The company’s strategic acquisition of Fave, a Southeast Asia-based consumer payments and loyalty platform, signalled a move into the B2C space, but besides this brief flirting with consumer fintech, Pine Labs has remained steadfast on the B2B opportunity.

Speaking to Inc42, Peak XV Partners’ managing director Shailendra Singh said that when the fund (then under Sequoia Capital) took a bet on Pine Labs, the digital payments revolution was only just starting. At the time, we knew that PoS would continue to remain a big opportunity.

“The likes of Square or Stripe had only just started out when we invested, so the PoS model was yet to be challenged. And as we can see now, it’s still very relevant and even UPI has not dethroned PoS as was claimed around 2018,” Singh recalled.

He added that while contactless payments were touted to be the future, the Indian market swerved away from this........

© Inc42