'We do not worry about (UPI) market share', says Amazon Pay India CEO

When asked if the regulator has been asking them to increase market share, Bansal said the need is to focus on growing the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) ecosystem

Even as the duopoly of PhonePe and Google Pay in the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) segment is a concern for the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), Vikas Bansal, CEO of Amazon Pay India believes that there is a need to focus on growing new digital payment instruments within the country. 

When asked if the regulator has been asking them to increase market share, Bansal said the need is to focus on growing the UPI ecosystem. 

“There is always a pressure, but it is not about increasing our market share, it is also to grow the overall payments ecosystem. Within UPI, this includes wallet on UPI, creditline on UPI, all these things. The pressure is not about increasing the share, but to grow products and services,” Bansal said in an interaction with Business Standard. 

 

He was speaking on the sidelines of the release of a joint survey by Kearney India and Amazon Pay India’s How Urban India Pays report. 

Two players, Walmart-backed PhonePe and Google Pay, account for a combined market share of over 86 per cent of UPI transaction volumes as of May. 

Amazon Pay is ranked fifth in terms of market share with the company processing 68.34 million UPI (Unified Payments Interface) transactions in May.

The largest player PhonePe processed 6831.92 million transactions in the same month. 

The NPCI, which runs the UPI ecosystem in India, had proposed a 30 per cent volume cap on third party application providers (TPAPs) in November 2022. It had asked UPI players to limit their market share to 30 per cent in two years.

The payments body will review its decision to introduce volume restrictions in December this year, Business Standard reported in April. The discussions on a volume cap come as there are concerns about a duopoly and a concentration risk in the UPI market. 

“We fundamentally believe that if we provide the best experience, in terms of convenience and speed, the customers will adopt us. The opportunity still is so huge and massive, that a lot of players still have a role to play. So, we never worry about the share and who has how much,” Bansal added. 

Meanwhile, the company is looking to tap into merchants after it received the final nod to operate as a payment aggregator (PA) from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in February. 

“There are places in large online merchants where we can innovate on Amazon Pay products, and that we can bring in. Merchants care about increasing their order value, getting new customers. The very simple playbook that has worked for us on the large merchants, how do you take it to more merchants in online space and then take it offline,” he added. 

Meanwhile, he indicated that the company continues looking at expanding partnerships with lenders to extend its buy now, pay later product (BNPL) Amazon Pay Later. 

“We always are looking for new partners and continue to add them. You will get more of them from us. We want to expand and have more and more partners in that,” he added. 

At present, the company has partnered with three lenders for BNPL such as Axio, KVB (Karur Vysya Bank) and IDFC First Bank.