NPCI enforces new market share rules on UPI for Google Pay, PhonePe, Paytm, others

In a move taken to ensure parity in India’s digital payments ecosystem and prevent market dominance by any single third-party player, the National Payments Corporation of India has issued detailed guidelines capping permissible volume for any UPI app at 30% of the overall market.

Starting January of 2021 on a three-month rolling basis, all payment apps on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) will be subject to a three-level threshold monitoring by NPCI albeit certain exemptions.

A UPI app that has breached 25% of market share will receive an “alert” from NPCI which they’ll have to “acknowledge”; on exceeding 27% market cap, the cited app must provide “evidence” to NPCI on its plans to bring down volume;