Majors such as Amazon and Meta are lobbying India’s payment agencies to curb the continued dominance of PhonePe and Google Pay in the country’s rapidly growing immediate payment networks.
According to TechCrunch, a number of platform executives, including Amazon Pay, WhatsApp, CRED, MobiKwik and Super.Money under the flag of Flipkart, will meet Thursday with the Indian State Payments Corporation (NPCI). NPCI operates the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) in India, which handles billions of transactions per month. More than a year has passed since India postponed the application of the UPI ceiling to 30 per cent until 31 December 2026. This measure would have limited the share of any single application in UPI transactions. The delay, which effectively allowed PhonePe and Google Pay to remain dominant in India, increased concerns among participants with smaller market shares about their own competitiveness. According to UPCI data, in March there were 22.6 billion transactions on the UPI network, and PhonePe and Google Pay accounted for 80 per cent. This is far greater than the rivals of Paytm, Super.Money, CRED, Amazon Pay and MobiKwik under the banner of Lipkart.
PhonePe announced this week that it had surpassed 700 million registered users in India and had more than 50 million businesses, highlighting its large size and consolidating its market position. The business that received PhonePe ‘ s payment covered more than 98 per cent of India ‘ s postal code areas, and its coverage was beyond the reach of smaller competitors. Participants such as Amazon and Meta are expected to question the way in which users in the UPI ecosystem are accessing, product design and profitability models. Proposals included limiting the use of user registration and contact data for mainstream applications, calling for the equitable provision of automated and mandatory payment functions, and requiring incentives and regulatory support to help emerging enterprises compete. The above companies find it difficult to compete with the current payment giants that dominate the market, and they are lobbying regulators to seek help. However, UPCI, under the supervision of the Reserve Bank of India, has had difficulty finding ways to both curb the monopoly of the giant without affecting the use of services by hundreds of millions of users.
It was not clear whether the conference would bring about any direct change, and doubts remained as to how the Indian national payment company would address market concentration.