New Delhi : The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is set to meet smaller players in the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) ecosystem at its Mumbai headquarters on Thursday, April 30, to discuss proposals aimed at boosting competition, including preferential incentives, early access to new features, and a review of Autopay-related restrictions, people familiar with the developments told Moneycontrol.
The discussions will focus on creating a level playing field between large and emerging third-party app providers (TPAPs), with measures such as relaxed feature parity norms and potential exclusive or early feature rollouts for smaller apps to broaden participation beyond the top players such as PhonePe and Google Pay, per sources.
The meeting is also expected to include discussions on targeted incentive programmes for emerging TPAPs, they added.
While National Payments Corporation of India has explored multiple ways to reduce concentration in UPI, preferential programmes have not been deployed so far.
Level-playing field
If implemented, this would be a notable shift from the current strategy at the NPCI. So far, the NPCI has rolled out all new features, like Autopay, UPI Lite, and more, to all participating players at an ecosystem-level, including for large apps like PhonePe and Google Pay, at the same time and not just to a select few players.
However, as the NPCI attempts to reduce concentration in the UPI ecosystem, it is likely to discuss piloting new features exclusively with smaller UPI apps to draw more users away from top apps and encourage adoption among others during its meeting later this week, sources said.
UPI payments is still a duopoly with PhonePe and Google Pay dominating with a total market share of around 80 percent despite a crop of new apps emerging in the last few years. About 30-odd apps collectively account for the remaining 20 percent market share.
BHIM, Cred, WhatsApp Pay, Mobikwik, Amazon Pay, super.money, Navi, among others are likely to be part of the NPCI meeting on April 30.
NPCI did not immediately reply to Moneycontrol’s request for comments.
Autopay rules to be discusses
NPCI is also expected to take up non-solicitation of AutoPay, with a view to tightening norms around autopay mandates, especially for smaller UPI apps, the people cited above said.
This comes at a time when a growing number of companies, especially new-age ones, have been relying on autopay mandates as a steady stream of income from customers, primarily the non-active ones.
It remains to be seen what discussions with the NPCI will translate to final outcomes in the UPI ecosystem.
