Amazon, Meta join fight to end Google Pay, PhonePe dominance in India

Amazon and Meta are among the big companies set to lobby India’s payments body over the dominance of Walmart-owned PhonePe and Google Pay in the country’s fast-growing instant payments network. Executives representing platforms including Amazon Pay, WhatsApp, CRED, MobiKwik, and Flipkart’s Super.money are scheduled to meet the National Payments Corporation of India on Thursday, TechCrunch has learned. The body operates the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), India’s instant payments system that processes billions of transactions each month. The meeting comes over a year after India deferred plans to cap the market share of UPI apps at 30% until December 31, 2026, a measure that would have limited any single app’s share of UPI transactions. That delay has effectively allowed PhonePe and Google Pay to retain their dominant positions, intensifying concerns among players with smaller shares about their ability to compete. PhonePe and Google Pay combined accounted for roughly 80% of the 22.6 billion transactions on the UPI network in March, data from NPCI shows . That scale far outpaces rivals such as Paytm, Flipkart’s Super.money, CRED, Amazon Pay, and MobiKwik. PhonePe said this week it has crossed 700 million registered users and 50 million merchants across India, underlining the scale that has helped entrench its position. The merchants that accept it spans more than 98% of the country’s postal codes, highlighting the reach that smaller rivals say is difficult to replicate. …