Smaller UPI apps to demand fresh curbs on market leaders at NPCI meet: Sources

A clutch of smaller third-party UPI players, including Amazon Pay, Cred, Super Money, and Navi, are set to demand fresh curbs on market leaders at a meeting with the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) on Thursday, as the industry grapples with the long-pending market share cap issue.

Industry executives told ET that the meeting, in which players beyond PhonePe, Google Pay, and Paytm will also participate, will see the smaller firms jointly pushing proposals aimed at limiting further expansion by the top three.

Among the measures being discussed are restrictions on user acquisition tactics such as solicitation of UPI ID mappers, and a ban on targeting people for app downloads based on a user’s contact book data.


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Industry executives also want tighter rules around monetisation, including preventing payment aggregators and gateways from charging on tokenised UPI checkouts at the app and instrument level.

Other proposals include curbs on “collect” requests unless accompanied by broader merchant-side democratisation, and restrictions on autopay mandates to avoid concentration of recurring payments with a handful of apps.

Separately, smaller TPAPs (third party app providers) are seeking preferential incentives, interoperability of transaction history and biller data across apps, and early or exclusive access to new UPI (Unified Payments Interface) features. They have also asked for temporary relaxations on feature parity requirements.

The push comes as the proposed 30% cap, first announced in 2020, has been pushed to the end of 2026. While intended to curb concentration risks, industry executives said NPCI itself now views the cap as difficult to enforce without disrupting user experience or transaction flows at scale.

The three large players — PhonePe, Google Pay, and Paytm — command over 85% of the market terms of volume, with Walmart-owned PhonePe alone having 45% share, followed by Google Pay at 33%, and Paytm at around 8%.

Earlier this week, PhonePe announced that it has more than 700 million registered users and 50 million merchants.

UPI has grown manifold over the last two years, and crossed 22 billion transactions per month. At this scale, a clutch of banks and two fintech apps cornering most of the market has triggered concerns around concentration risk on the payment network.