“The only choice is to kill or get killed,” said a payments executive at a fintech.

They were referring to one of the biggest fintech upsets of the year, when payment aggregators Phonepe, Razorpay, Cashfree, and Paytm* all decided to pull support for orchestrator Juspay. Just in time to mess up its latest funding round, no less.

The two sides have been in a no-holds-barred stare-down since January. (The Ken covered this hereThe KenRazorpay and Cashfree woke up and chose violence and hereThe Ken).

On one side are the aggregators, who power payments for millions of online merchants. And on the other side is “aggregator of aggregators” Juspay, who’s worked as an extension of merchants’ payments teams, helping them coordinate payments across aggregators, for over a decade. More than 500 of India’s biggest internet companies—think Meesho, Bigbasket, Zepto, IRCTC, Swiggy—rely on Juspay to process nearly 200 million transactions a day. That’s roughly a third of all the digital transactions in India.

For long, the two had just about tolerated each other. Merchants couldn’t do without the aggregators—but to juggle them effectively, they needed Juspay. Sitting in the middle, Juspay let merchants play aggregator bingo—optimising for uptime, fees, and success rates. Aggregators had scale, but Juspay had leverage.

But then in early 2024, Juspay overstepped. It got a payment aggregator license itself, sparking off a quit-Juspay movement.

Now, Indian finserv is no koi pond. Banks and fintechs have long been at each other’s throats; and even among fintechs, relentless poaching and race-to-the-bottom pricing pressures have led to perpetually raised hackles. But a whole set of companies turning on just one entity? That’s rare.

And the timing couldn’t be worse for Juspay. Aggregators’ all-out offensive has watered down its funding. The Softbank-backed startup just raisedMoneycontrolJuspay raises $60 million in series D round led by Kedaara Capital $60 million in a Series D round from private equity firm Kedaara Capital at a valuation that was shy of $1 billion dollars. But this was significantly lower than the $150 million it had planned. All things considered, the standoff is proving to be a true test of investors’ and merchants’ resolve to back Juspay.