Amazon and Meta lobby India's payments body over market dominance

Amazon and Meta are set to lobby the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI)—the regulatory body that operates the country’s instant payments system—over the market dominance of PhonePe and Google Pay. The scheduled meeting, which is set to take place on Thursday, will bring together executives from several digital platforms, including Amazon, WhatsApp, CRED, MobiKwik, and Super.money. These participants are expected to raise concerns about user acquisition practices, product design, and monetization within the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) ecosystem, which processes billions of transactions each month. The lobbying effort represents a push by tech companies to challenge the current market structure of India’s digital payments landscape, where two players hold the vast majority of transactions.

The upcoming meeting follows India’s decision to defer plans to cap the market share of UPI apps at 30% until December 31, 2026. This regulatory delay has effectively allowed PhonePe and Google Pay to maintain their dominant positions in the market, intensifying concerns among players with smaller market shares about their ability to compete. Together, PhonePe and Google Pay accounted for roughly 80% of the 22.6 billion transactions processed on the UPI network in March, according to data from the NPCI. While the NPCI operates under the supervision of the Reserve Bank of India, the regulatory body has struggled to find effective ways to curb this market dominance without disrupting services used by hundreds of millions of users.

Smaller players in the ecosystem, including WhatsApp, CRED, MobiKwik, and Super.money, are joining the push to address the competitive imbalance. These companies find it increasingly difficult to compete with the dominant instant payments players. For context, PhonePe recently disclosed that it has crossed 700 million registered users and 50 million merchants across India. Additionally, PhonePe’s merchant acceptance network spans more than 98% of the country’s postal codes. This scale highlights the extensive reach that smaller rivals argue is difficult to replicate, prompting them to lobby the regulatory body for assistance in creating a more level playing field.

Why it matters

The lobbying effort highlights the ongoing tension between India’s regulatory push for a competitive digital payments market and the entrenched dominance of early movers like PhonePe and Google Pay.