The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the governing body overseeing the country's widely used Unified Payments Interface (UPI) mobile payment system, is planning to address PhonePe's growing market dominance. Ready to engage with various fintech startups this month to develop practical. and Google Pay in the UPI ecosystem.

NPCI executives plan to meet with representatives from CRED, Flipkart, Fampay and Amazon, among other players, to promote and support UPI transactions on their respective apps, people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. Their important steps can be discussed to understand.

UPI, created by a consortium of Indian banks, has become the most popular way for Indians to transact online, processing more than 10 billion transactions a month.

The new meetings are part of a growing effort by lawmakers and industry players to address concerns over the concentration of market share by Google Pay and PhonePe, which account for about 86% of UPI transactions by volume. are, which is more than 82.5% in the end. December Walmart Owns more than three-quarters of PhonePe..

Paytm, the third-largest UPI player, saw its market share fall to 9.1 percent by the end of March, down from 13 percent by the end of 2023. A restriction by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).

An Overview of India's UPI Ecosystem (Photo: Macquarie)

The conversation comes after the central bank expressed “displeasure” with NPCI over the growing duopoly in the payments space, a person familiar with the matter said. An NPCI spokesperson declined to comment.

In February, a parliamentary panel in India urged the government. Support the growth of domestic fintech players. which could offer alternatives to the Walmart-backed PhonePe and Google Pay apps.

NPCI has long advocated capping the market share of individual companies participating in the UPI ecosystem to 30%. However, he has Extension of deadline For firms to comply with this directive by the end of December 2024. The organization faces a unique challenge in implementing this directive: it believes that A technical mechanism to do this is currently lacking.TechCrunch previously reported.

RBI is also mulling an incentive plan to create a more favorable playing field for budding UPI players, said another person familiar with the matter. Indian daily Economic Times separately Reported On Wednesday, NPCI is encouraging fintech companies to offer incentives to their customers, promoting the use of their respective apps to conduct UPI transactions.