Amazon and Meta are among the major companies set to lobby India’s payments regulator for Walmart-owned PhonePe and Google Pay to dominate the country’s fast-growing instant payments network.
Executives representing platforms such as Amazon Pay, WhatsApp, CRED, MobiKwik and Flipkart’s Super.money are scheduled to meet with India’s National Payments Corporation on Thursday, according to TechCrunch. The agency operates the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), India’s instant payment system that processes billions of transactions every month.
The meeting comes more than a year after India shelved plans to limit the market share of UPI apps to 30 percent by December 31, 2026, a measure that would limit any app’s share of UPI transactions. This delay effectively allowed PhonePe and Google Pay to maintain their dominant positions, heightening concerns among players with smaller shares about their ability to compete.
PhonePe and Google Pay together accounted for about 80% of the 22.6 billion transactions on the UPI network in March, data from NPCI shows. This scale far surpasses competitors like Paytm, Flipkart’s Super.money, CRED, Amazon Pay and MobiKwik.
PhonePe said this week that it has crossed 700 million registered users and 50 million merchants across India, underscoring the scale that has helped cement its position. Merchants who accept it cover more than 98% of the country’s postcodes, underscoring a reach that smaller competitors say is difficult to replicate.
An agenda reviewed by TechCrunch shows that participants, including Amazon and Meta, are expected to raise concerns about user acquisition practices, product design and monetization within the UPI ecosystem. Among the proposals are restrictions on how mainstream apps onboard users and use contact data, calls for fair access to features such as automatic payment and payment orders, and requests for incentives and regulatory support to help emerging players compete.
As these companies find it harder to compete with the dominant instant payment players, they are lobbying the regulator to help them. But NPCI, which operates under the supervision of the Reserve Bank of India, has struggled to find ways to limit dominance without disrupting services used by hundreds of millions of users.
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NPCI, Amazon, Meta and others did not respond to requests for comment.
It remains unclear whether the meeting will lead to immediate changes, with questions still lingering about how NPCI might tackle market concentration.
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