Amazon and Meta are among a group of firms preparing to raise concerns with India’s payments authority over the market dominance of leading apps on the country’s instant payments network.
Meeting With Payments Authority
Executives from services including Amazon Pay, WhatsApp, CRED, MobiKwik, and Flipkart’s Super.money are scheduled to meet the National Payments Corporation of India, which operates the Unified Payments Interface (UPI).
UPI is a real-time payments system that handles billions of transactions monthly and is overseen by the Reserve Bank of India.
Market Concentration Concerns
The discussions follow a delay in implementing a proposed rule to cap any single app’s share of UPI transactions at 30%. The deadline for that cap has been extended to December 31, 2026.
Data from NPCI shows that PhonePe and Google Pay together accounted for about 80% of the 22.6 billion UPI transactions recorded in March.
PhonePe recently reported more than 700 million registered users and 50 million merchants across India, with acceptance in over 98% of postal codes.
Issues Raised By Competing Platforms
According to an agenda reviewed by TechCrunch, companies plan to raise concerns about user acquisition practices, product design, and monetization within the ecosystem.
Proposals include restrictions on how dominant platforms onboard users and use contact data, requests for equal access to features such as autopay and payment mandates, and calls for incentives or regulatory measures to support smaller competitors.
Regulatory Challenges
NPCI faces the task of addressing market concentration while maintaining the stability of a system used by hundreds of millions of people.
It remains unclear whether the meeting will result in immediate policy changes, as regulators weigh competition concerns against the operational scale of the existing network.
Featured image credits: Vecteezy
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