Amazon Pay Focuses on Growth, Not UPI Market Share

Mumbai, Jul 9 (PTI) Amazon Pay India does not worry about its market shares in the UPI ecosystem and is more focused on the opportunity in the digital payments space, a top executive on Tuesday said.

He said this in response to a question on the NPCI guideline for restricting the market share of a single entity to 30 per cent by December 2024.

"The opportunity is so huge and massive that a lot of players have still a role to play. So, I never get worried about the share, and who has how much. I worry about can I give the best to the customer and how much opportunity is there before us," its chief executive Vikas Bansal told reporters at a company event.

There are a lot of places where the company has got a lot of success in terms of large customer adoption, and there are places where the company is making progress, Bansal added.

He declined to specify the policy interventions, which can help the ecosystem of UPI apps achieve the targets spelt out by the National Payments Corporation (NPCI).

It can be noted that the NPCI has asked the system to ensure that no third-party app holds more than 30 per cent share in the payments market by December 2024. At present, Phonepe and Google Pay are well over the target and command over 85 per cent of the market, leaving others like Amazon Pay, Cred and Paytm with the smaller size of the pie.

Bansal said the buy now pay later (BNPL), which has received higher attention lately, is bound to grow in a country like India but underlined the need to grow responsibly on it.

He suggested that the number of people using the service would have grown despite the regulatory interventions against digital lenders and also unsecured lending through the increase in risk weights.

The company did a survey of over 6,000 respondents in the top 120 cities witnessing the highest number of e-commerce transactions, which revealed that 34 per cent of the respondents had used BNPL.

On an overall basis, 87 per cent of the respondents said that they were aware of BNPL, Bansal said.

The survey done in association with consulting firm Kearney said 90 per cent of respondents favour digital payments for online transactions, while nearly half extend this preference to brick-and-mortar stores.

The survey, which also included 1,000 merchants, also revealed that nearly half of the transactions at street vendors' ends are happening through the digital payments mode.