Amazon and Meta join the fight to end the dominance of Google Pay and PhonePe in India

Amazon and Meta are among the major companies set to lobby the Payments Authority of India 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 set to meet with India’s national payments company on Thursday, TechCrunch has learned. The authority runs the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), India’s instant payments system that processes billions of transactions every month.

The meeting comes more than a year after India postponed its plans to cap a 30% market share for UPI apps until December 31, 2026, a measure that would have limited any single app’s share of UPI transactions. This delay has allowed PhonePe and Google Pay to maintain their dominant positions, intensifying concerns among players with smaller shares about their ability to compete.

Data from NPCI shows that PhonePe and Google Pay combined accounted for nearly 80% of the 22.6 billion transactions on the UPI network in March. This range far exceeds its competitors like 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, underscoring the scale that has helped cement its position. Merchants that accept it cover more than 98% of the country’s zip codes, highlighting a reach that smaller competitors say is difficult to replicate.

The agenda reviewed by TechCrunch shows that participants, including Amazon and Meta, are expected to raise concerns about user acquisition, product design, and monetization practices within the UPI ecosystem. Among the proposals are restrictions on how dominant apps accommodate users and use contact data, calls for fair access to features such as automatic payment and payment authorizations, and requests for incentives and regulatory support to help emerging players compete.

Because these companies find it difficult to compete with the dominant instant payment companies, they put pressure on the regulator to help them. However, the NPCI, which operates under the supervision of the Reserve Bank of India, has struggled to find ways to reduce dominance without disrupting services used by hundreds of millions of users.

NPCI, Amazon, Meta and others did not respond to requests for comment.

It remains unclear whether the meeting will lead to any immediate changes, with questions persisting about how NPCI will handle market concentration.