India does not lack imagination. We have engineers who build world-class products on a shoestring, founders who ship on weekends, and teams that solve problems the rest of the world has not noticed yet. What we also have, it turns out, is a parallel talent pool that is every bit as creative. Its speciality is building roadblocks.
This morning I met their latest masterpiece. A phone call asking that one of our Directors be physically present at our office so that an agent could take a selfie with them. Not to inspect a server. Not to ask a single question about the business. A selfie. Proof of life, compliance edition.
Let me explain how a small app on the Google Play Store got us here.
The “high-risk” app in question
Our app is not a lending app. It is not a social media platform hoovering up the private lives of millions. It is not a threat to the sovereignty of the nation, however hard one squints. Its a simple face attendance app that runs entirely locally on the mobile device with privacy first design.
Here are the numbers that apparently keep Google and Billdesk compliance teams awake at night:
- About 1,000 free users
- Fewer than 50 paying users
- Revenue in the thousands of rupees. Not lacs or crores, but just thousands.
We did not build it to get rich or go viral. We built it as an engineering exercise: to test scale and security on a live consumer app, to keep pace with the constant changes in the Google Play ecosystem, and to earn real experience shipping and maintaining apps on Google Play and the Apple App Store.
That experience has value. When an enterprise RFP asks whether we have integrated with and released apps on both stores, we answer from practice, not from a slide. This is exactly the kind of small, sensible experiment a healthy startup ecosystem should encourage.
Welcome to the verification marathon
Since 1 January 2026, Google has required new merchant accounts selling in India to verify directly with BillDesk, its partner for RBI’s cross-border payment aggregator rules (Google Payments Help).
The fine print is the best part. Google says BillDesk must run its own independent KYC, separate from any verification you have already completed with Google. So you prove who you are to Google. Then you prove it again to BillDesk. Two front doors, same house, same people living inside.
We did it anyway. A complex application. Incorporation documents, director IDs, addresses, bank details, and a stack of supporting papers that would make a home loan business correspondent blush (and say enough!).
On 17 October, the reply arrived. Our application had been “assigned to our representative for physical verification”, who would coordinate a visit and complete our KYC during it. So, we are assuming that the rest of the documents are fully accepted and there is just one more sealed and signed doc (Our MOA and AOA) that needs to be handed over.
This morning came the call. Please ensure a Director is present, for a selfie wtih the Billdesk Agent. I said it was preposterous and sought the regulation on this. The call center agent simply said this was Billdesk’s process and we need to comply in order for our application to be approved.
The law asks for an address. BillDesk asks for a Selfie.
Let me be fair here as as i did my research. RBI’s Payment Aggregator Directions of September 2025 do require Contact Point Verification. RBI defines it as physical verification of the merchant’s address or place of business (RBI Master Direction). But again, RBI also asks organisations to apply the due diligence proportional to the risk on the ground. Not a one size fits all compliance hammer so it can slam everything that looks like a nail.
Address is a reasonable thing to check which we have already submitted through COI, GST, MSME, Bank Account as proofs. Still, an address can be verified and our registered office can be visited, and ours will happily receive guests.
What the definition does not say is that a Director must be summoned to stand next to an agent for a selfie. Somewhere between the RBI circular and this morning’s phone call, “verify the place of business” became “produce a founder and say cheese”. Nobody wrote that down. It simply happened, the way most bad processes in India do.
The same RBI Directions even describe a separate due diligence route for small merchants with annual turnover up to ₹40 lakh (Source). The regulator, at least on paper, recognises that a corner shop and a conglomerate are different things. Our annual Play revenue would struggle to buy a decent laptop. Yet we are processed exactly like a gaming company or a lending app with millions of users and crores flowing through it.
That is the heart of it. Risk is supposed to be applied proportionately at the time of KYC verification and due diligence. Here it is applied uniformly, which is a polite way of saying it is not applied at all. A checklist is followed by an online process, and the checklist does not care who you are or have the basic intelligence to triage the form based on the risk of the application in evaluation.
We are not the only ones
A short scroll through LinkedIn, X and developer forums shows we are in large and growing company.
- A founder posted on LinkedIn that his company had waited three months for BillDesk KYC while more than a million monthly users could not be charged. He added that every founder he knew was stuck. Just search for Billdesk KYC issues and a ton of posts appear on this topic in LinkedIn.
- An indie developer on X reported losing ₹3–4 lakh after in-app purchases were switched off pending verification, with five weeks of daily emails answered by templates (X).
- Developers on Google Play KYC forums describe physical KYC visits as routine, and a fresh one if you change your address and multiple application rejecections. A simple google search will bring this up.
- Even Google’s own help page concedes that verification with BillDesk “may take longer” (Google Payments Help) – what exactly is google trying to say here with their warning, that we are dealing with a broken system?
Slowly but surely, we are losing patience (not money) over bad and ridiculous processes that make doing business in India even harder for those who are considering setting up a business. Both are bad news for a country that wants a trillion-dollar digital economy.
What would actually help
Complaining is easy, so here is the free consulting for Billdesk and Google. None of it requires new law.
- Tier the risk. An app earning a few thousand rupees a year and an app moving crores a month should not walk the same path. The small merchant route already exists on paper. Use it in practice. And increase the compliance when we cross major milestones.
- Verify the place, not the person. Contact Point Verification is about an address. A geo-tagged photo of the office, or the video KYC India already uses to open bank accounts, does the job without dragging Directors in for a photo shoot.
- Reuse what already exists (as they are government records and there are APIs to verify). MCA filings, GSTIN, CKYC records and Google’s own completed verification all establish who we are. Asking for the same facts three times is not diligence, it is a pain and teh technical term is ‘duplication’.
- Keep it simple. India is already a challenging place to do business, and please don’t add fuel to the fire. Innovate and figure ways to make this simple and a one touch process – you have all the money Google, you can do it.
Ease of doing business, in reverse gear
The saddest part is not the selfie with one of our Directors that is mandated for the Google Play KYC process, it is how quietly we have all agreed that this is normal. Founders grumble in WhatsApp groups, comply, and move on (including us). So much for ease of doing business. If anything, this is the opposite.
We will not be sending a Director to pose for a photograph that proves nothing a document has not already proved. This is just a matter of principle, taking a stand. Perhaps it is time to pull the plug on the app altogether. We will do so when Google bots automatically blocks us and that will be the end of our App on Google Play. It would be pretty sad that we have to announce to our Users that we are shutting the lights off on an App that they love using.
If and when we do so, Google and BillDesk deserve credit (if common sense does not return by then). They have found a remarkably efficient way to move creative entrepreneurs out of the Play Store, and that is one metric where they are clearly over-delivering. And I sincerely hope and wish that the regulators and policy makers take a note of this process that is affecting millions of small merchants collecting payments from international customers legitimately through the Google Play store channel connected to legitimate business and business bank accounts.
By copy to Google – We are also a verification company and we provide awesome KYC verification services, without the hassles that you are experiencing from your customers. I think you should book a demo with us so we can showcase what is truly possible for the next wave of KYC verifications on your platform, and make it easier, simpler and above all a process that makes super sense.
