India's veteran payment gateway — Mumbai-built since 2001 by Vishwas Patel, now owned by BSE/NSE-listed Infibeam Avenues (rebranding to AvenuesAI in 2025), processing $20B+ annually across ~1M+ merchants in India and the UAE
CCAvenue is one of the two veteran Indian payment gateways alongside BillDesk, both founded in the early 2000s, both predating the consumer-internet payments boom by a decade. CCAvenue was founded in September 2001 in Mumbai by Vishwas Patel, originally under Avenues India Pvt Ltd, and has spent 25 years building India's largest "long tail" merchant payment-gateway footprint — currently ~1 million+ merchants across India and the UAE, processing more than $20 billion per year in transactions. The company was acquired by Infibeam (founded by Vishal Mehta in 2007) via a March 2017 merger, becoming Infibeam Avenues Limited — the merged entity has been publicly listed on the BSE and NSE since 2016 (Infibeam was India's first listed e-commerce company), and in December 2025 announced its rebrand to AvenuesAI Limited, with Vishwas Patel elevated from Joint MD to Managing Director and CEO. The CCAvenue brand will continue as the primary identity of the payment-gateway business under the new corporate parent. For Indian product teams the right framing is: CCAvenue is the right call when you're a long-tail SMB merchant who values the deep payment-instrument coverage (200+ instruments including international cards, regional UPI variants, sukuk-friendly options for UAE), or when you need a publicly-listed-vendor counterparty for procurement reasons. For developer-friendly checkout at startup scale, Razorpay / Cashfree / Stripe still win.
📰 2025 corporate update. Infibeam Avenues — the BSE/NSE-listed parent of CCAvenue — announced on 11 December 2025 that it would rebrand to AvenuesAI Limited, reflecting a strategic shift toward AI-led payments and fintech infrastructure. Vishwas Patel was elevated to MD and CEO; Vishal Mehta continues as Chairman. The CCAvenue brand will remain as the primary product identity for the payment-gateway business. Statutory and regulatory clearances for the corporate-name change are in progress through 2026.
CCAvenue is a payment gateway and online aggregator that lets merchants in India and the UAE accept payments via cards, UPI, netbanking, wallets, EMIs and dozens of other instruments. The product was founded in September 2001 in Mumbai by Vishwas Patel, originally as a service of Avenues India Pvt Ltd. It is one of the longest-running payment gateways in India — predating Razorpay (2014), Cashfree (2015), and the broader UPI / consumer-fintech wave by a decade — and built its early footprint by serving the long tail of Indian SMB merchants, education institutions, ticketing companies, and travel/tour operators that the bigger banks weren't yet directly servicing.
The corporate structure today is two layers: CCAvenue is the product brand; Infibeam Avenues Limited (rebranding to AvenuesAI Limited through 2026) is the listed parent company. The two came together via a March 2017 merger between Infibeam — a Gandhinagar-headquartered e-commerce and payments company founded by Vishal Mehta in 2007 — and Avenues India Pvt Ltd (which housed CCAvenue). The combined entity has been listed on the BSE and NSE since 2016 (Infibeam Incorporation Limited was India's first listed e-commerce company), making CCAvenue the only Indian payment gateway whose underlying parent has a publicly traded equity. That's a meaningful procurement signal for risk-averse enterprise and BFSI buyers.
The most recent major corporate event: on 11 December 2025, the company announced that Infibeam Avenues will rebrand to AvenuesAI Limited, signalling a strategic pivot toward AI-led payments and financial-services infrastructure. As part of the same announcement, Vishwas Patel was elevated from Joint Managing Director to Managing Director and CEO; Vishal Mehta continues as Chairman. Importantly, the CCAvenue brand will continue as the primary identity for the payment-gateway and merchant-services business — so customers don't need to change anything.
At scale, CCAvenue today processes more than $20 billion in transactions annually across ~1 million+ merchants. It is among the top 3 online payment gateways in India by merchant count, and ranks #2 in the UAE among non-bank private digital payment companies. The previous "30,000+ merchants" figure on this page was decades out of date — corrected to the latest published figures.
200+ payment instruments — credit / debit cards (Visa / Mastercard / RuPay / Amex / Diners), netbanking with 60+ Indian banks, UPI (apps + intents + collect), wallets (Paytm / PhonePe / MobiKwik), EMIs (cardless and standard), pay-later options. Among the deepest instrument coverage of any Indian gateway.
Multi-currency support including USD, GBP, EUR, AED, SAR, OMR, and others. Particularly strong in the UAE market where CCAvenue is the #2 non-bank digital payments player. Useful for cross-border ecommerce, travel, education, and exports.
Hosted CCAvenue checkout page (no PCI-DSS scope for the merchant), iframe-embedded checkout, and direct API integration for advanced merchants. Plug-ins for major Indian e-commerce platforms (Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, OpenCart, Drupal).
UPI Autopay (e-mandate based), card-on-file recurring (RBI-compliant under the 2021–2022 framework), netbanking standing instructions. Used by SaaS, education, OTT and insurance customers.
Generate invoice / payment links over WhatsApp, SMS, email; useful for merchants who don't have a website but need to collect digital payments. Standard across the modern payment-gateway category but mature at CCAvenue.
PCI-DSS Level 1 certified; built-in fraud-detection rules; 3D Secure 2.x compliant; tokenisation for card storage under RBI's CoF framework. Risk scoring on each transaction with merchant-configurable thresholds.
CCAvenue uses MDR (Merchant Discount Rate) pricing, similar to other Indian gateways. Indicative ranges (always verify with sales — final pricing depends heavily on volume, instrument mix, and segment):
The previous page text "MDR from 1.99%" was directionally correct but lacked structure. Real comparison vs Razorpay / Cashfree: CCAvenue is roughly competitive on MDR for cards, slightly less aggressive on the lowest-tier startup contracts (Razorpay's published 2% rate-card is often the easier sell), but more flexible at the high-volume enterprise end where the listed-parent dynamic helps in long procurement cycles.
CCAvenue is the wrong call when: you're a developer-led startup wanting the best documentation, sandbox, and SDKs (use Razorpay or Cashfree); you specifically need recurring BFSI / BBPS / utility-aggregator rails (use BillDesk); or you sell SaaS subscriptions globally (use Stripe or Chargebee + Razorpay).