Amazon and Meta to lobby Indian payments body over UPI market dominance

7 articles · Updated · TechCrunch · Apr 29

Executives from Amazon Pay, WhatsApp, CRED, MobiKwik, and Flipkart’s Super.money will meet NPCI on Thursday to address PhonePe and Google Pay’s 80% share of March’s 22.6 billion UPI transactions.
The group seeks restrictions on dominant apps’ user onboarding, fairer access to features, and regulatory incentives, as PhonePe now claims 700 million users and 50 million merchants across 98% of India’s postal codes.
NPCI, under RBI supervision, faces challenges in curbing market concentration without disrupting services for hundreds of millions, and it remains unclear if the meeting will prompt immediate regulatory changes.

India’s payment system is a duopoly. Is a regulatory crackdown on Google and PhonePe imminent?

If regulators cap PhonePe and Google Pay, what happens to their millions of users?

As AI agents start making payments, is India's UPI network secure from new threats?

Can the Indian government's own BHIM app truly challenge the Google-Walmart payments empire?

UPI transactions are free but cost billions. Who will ultimately foot the bill for this system?