Global Tech Giants Challenge PhonePe and Google Pay's Dominance in India's UPI System

Major global tech companies are mounting a coordinated push to challenge the stranglehold that PhonePe and Google Pay hold over India's Unified Payments Interface, taking their case directly to the country's payments regulator. Amazon, Meta to hold a lobbying meeting According to TechCrunch, executives representing Amazon Pay, WhatsApp, CRED, MobiKwik, and Flipkart's Super.money are scheduled to meet the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the body that operates UPI, India's instant payments system that processes billions of transactions each month. Amazon and Meta are among the prominent names participating in the push. Google Play, PhonePe own 80 percent majority stake in UPI transactions The numbers illustrate why smaller players are alarmed. PhonePe and Google Pay combined accounted for roughly 80 percent of the 22.6 billion transactions on the UPI network in March, according to NPCI data. PhonePe this week said it has crossed 700 million registered users and 50 million merchants, with acceptance spanning more than 98 percent of India's postal codes, a scale that smaller rivals say is nearly impossible to replicate. What the challengers are demanding TechCrunch reviewed an agenda for the meeting showing that participants are expected to raise concerns across three broad areas: user acquisition practices, product design, and monetization within the UPI ecosystem. Specific proposals include restrictions on how dominant apps onboard users and use contact data, fair access to features such as autopay and payment mandates, and requests for incentives and regulatory support for emerging players. The meeting comes more than a year after India deferred plans to cap any single UPI app's market share at 30 percent, pushing the deadline to December 31, 2026. The delay has effectively allowed PhonePe and Google Pay to retain and entrench their dominant positions. NPCI, which operates under the Reserve Bank of India's supervision, has previously struggled to find ways to curb dominance without disrupting services used by hundreds of millions of users.