Google Pay, PhonePe Hit by India’s Move to Limit Some Digital Payments Players. The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has a mandate to set a cap of 30% on total UPI transactions.
NPCI has put a cap of 30% on the total volume of UPI transactions done by Third-Party App Providers. As government reports show, about 2 billion UPI transactions are taking place every month. According to NPCI, 40% of transactions were done by PhonePe, 40% by Google Pay, the rest by Paytm, and others.
According to the NPCI cap of 30% transactions will “address the risk and protect the UPI ecosystem as it further scales up”. This cap will come into action from January 2021. NPCI also said the cap “will be calculated based on the total volume of transactions processed in UPI during the preceding three months on a rolling basis”.
The main motto of NPCI is to ensure that the total market isn’t controlled by a few big players. As the report shows there is a monopoly of two big Third-Party Apps, namely Google Pay and PhonePe. So to make the market more competitive, NPCI has taken these steps.
However, this cap does not apply to Paytm and Reliance’s Payments Bank as they have banking licenses from RBI and do not fall under the Third-Party App category.
The NPCI also allowed WhatsApp to launch its Payments system in a graded manner with maximum users of 20 million. Which is the first step for a 30% cap as WhatsApp has a huge user base of 400 million.
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