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India’s Unified Payments Interface has emerged as one of the most transformative digital payment infrastructures in the world, processing billions of transactions every month. However, beneath this remarkable growth lies a structural concern that is now drawing the attention of global technology giants. PhonePe and Google Pay together command approximately 80 percent of the 22.6 billion UPI transactions recorded in March 2026, a level of market concentration that rivals argue renders fair competition virtually impossible.
The Coalition Taking Shape
Amazon and Meta are spearheading a coordinated industry effort to address this imbalance. Executives representing Amazon Pay, WhatsApp, CRED, MobiKwik, and Flipkart’s Super.money have approached the National Payments Corporation of India, the regulatory body that operates the UPI network under the supervision of the Reserve Bank of India. The coalition is seeking structural reforms that would level the competitive landscape and create equitable conditions for all participants within the ecosystem.
Key Demands on the Table
The agenda presented to NPCI spans three critical areas. First, the coalition is calling for restrictions on how dominant platforms onboard new users and utilise contact data, practices that smaller players argue provide an unfair advantage in user acquisition. Second, participants are seeking equal access to core UPI functionalities, including autopay mechanisms and payment mandates, which are currently more readily available to established players. Third, the group is requesting regulatory incentives and institutional support to enable emerging platforms to scale their operations meaningfully.
The Regulatory Backdrop
The urgency of this push is compounded by India’s decision to defer its proposed 30 percent market share cap on any single UPI application until December 31, 2026. This extension, granted by NPCI in January 2025, has afforded PhonePe and Google Pay additional time to consolidate their positions. PhonePe alone now reports 700 million registered users and merchant acceptance across more than 98 percent of India’s postal codes — a scale that competitors describe as structurally prohibitive to replicate.
Conclusion
The forthcoming regulatory deliberations will be pivotal in determining whether India’s digital payments infrastructure evolves into a genuinely competitive marketplace or continues to consolidate around its two dominant players. The outcome will have lasting implications not only for industry participants but for the hundreds of millions of users who depend on UPI for their daily financial transactions.
Also Read: PhonePe scripts history as the first UPI application to cross 10 billion monthly transactions
