Indian Govt Plans To End UPI Monopoly: Google Pay And PhonePe's Loss, Facebook's Gain?

Unified payments interface or UPI developed by National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has changed the way people do normal financial transactions. With most shops and establishments now accepting UPI payment, services like PhonePe and Google Pay have captured the major share when it comes to payments.

There were more than 2.07 billion UPI transactions just in October, where PhonePe and Google Pay had around 40 percent of the market share (80 percent in total). The remaining 20 percent was split between other popular services like Paytm.

According to the latest regulatory update from NPCI, starting from January 2021, a single UPI platform can only process up to 30 percent of the total transactions. Hence, there is a high possibility that your UPI transaction on Google Pay or PhonePe might just fail if these platforms reach that 30 percent limit.

In one way, the latest norm from NPCI opens up the market to the competition, giving fair opportunity to the competition to compete against the biggies. However, this also means a customer might have to sign-up for additional UPI payment portals to be on the safer side.

The total number of UPI transactions is likely to grow in the coming days, as more and more people are favoring UPI payments rather than cash transactions. One can easily make a payment in a second using a smartphone without any issue, and service providers like Google Pay and PhonePe are offering a lot of deals and cashback to woo the customers.

Facebook recently launched WhatsApp Pay in India, which is likely to go mainstream in the coming days. Given most smartphone users in India use WhatsApp, there is a high chance that WhatsApp Pay might just become the go-to UPI payment app that also happens to be a free instant messaging and calling app without any ads.