Amazon, Meta join fight to end Google Pay, PhonePe dominance in India

Amazon and Meta are among the large companies acceptable to lobby India’s payments assemblage implicit the dominance of Walmart-owned PhonePe and Google Pay successful the country’s fast-growing instant payments network.

Executives representing platforms including Amazon Pay, WhatsApp, CRED, MobiKwik, and Flipkart’s Super.money are scheduled to conscionable the National Payments Corporation of India connected Thursday, TechCrunch has learned. The assemblage operates the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), India’s instant payments strategy that processes billions of transactions each month.

The gathering comes implicit a twelvemonth aft India deferred plans to headdress the marketplace share of UPI apps astatine 30% until December 31, 2026, a measurement that would person constricted immoderate azygous app’s stock of UPI transactions. That hold has efficaciously allowed PhonePe and Google Pay to clasp their ascendant positions, intensifying concerns among players with smaller shares astir their quality to compete.

PhonePe and Google Pay combined accounted for astir 80% of the 22.6 cardinal transactions connected the UPI web successful March, information from NPCI shows. That standard acold outpaces rivals specified arsenic Paytm, Flipkart’s Super.money, CRED, Amazon Pay, and MobiKwik.

PhonePe said this week it has crossed 700 cardinal registered users and 50 cardinal merchants crossed India, underlining the standard that has helped entrench its position. The merchants that judge it spans much than 98% of the country’s postal codes, highlighting the scope that smaller rivals accidental is hard to replicate.

An docket reviewed by TechCrunch shows participants, including Amazon and Meta, are expected to rise concerns astir idiosyncratic acquisition practices, merchandise design, and monetization wrong the UPI ecosystem. Among the proposals are restrictions connected however ascendant apps onboard users and usage interaction data, calls for just entree to features specified arsenic autopay and outgo mandates, and requests for incentives and regulatory enactment to assistance emerging players compete.

Because these companies find it harder to vie with the ascendant instant wage players, they are lobbying the regulatory assemblage to assistance them. However, the NPCI, which operates nether the Reserve Bank of India’s supervision, has struggled to find ways to curb dominance without disrupting services utilized by hundreds of millions of users.

NPCI, Amazon, Meta, and others did not respond to requests for comment.

It remains unclear whether the gathering volition pb to immoderate contiguous changes, with questions persisting implicit however NPCI could code marketplace concentration.