Amazon, Google vie for piece of India's digital payment market

Technology giants Facebook Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Google and credit-card providers Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. are among those vying for unprecedented access to India’s burgeoning digital retail payments market. The companies are part of four consortia preparing to apply for licenses to operate retail payments and settlement systems in the country, people familiar with the matter said. More companies could band together before a March 31 application deadline.

With India’s smartphone user base approaching 1 billion and Credit Suisse Group AG predicting $1 trillion in online payments in the country in 2023, the companies chosen to enable such transactions stand to reap lucrative commissions.

“India’s mobile digital payments is seeing huge growth in a post-pandemic world,” said Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder and chief executive officer of New Delhi-based payment provider Paytm. “It’s a good time to open up more diverse payments solutions and keep the momentum going.”

One of the consortia consists of Amazon, Visa, Indian retail banks ICICI Bank Ltd. and Axis Bank Ltd. as well as fintech startups Pine Labs and BillDesk. Another group is led by billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries Ltd. and its partners Facebook and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, which together agreed to invest more than $10 billion in Reliance’s digital services unit last year.

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Sharma’s Paytm heads a group that includes ride-hailing startup Ola and at least five other companies. The fourth consortium consists of Tata Group, Mastercard, telecom operator Bharti Airtel Ltd. and retail banks Kotak Mahindra Bank Ltd. and HDFC Bank Ltd.

Sharma, a spokeswoman for Tata Group and a spokesman for Google declined to comment on the potential bidders. Amazon and Facebook didn’t respond to emailed questions. The contest is fierce as regulator Reserve Bank of India is expected to give just one or two licenses, as implied in its notification inviting bids. The process to decide the winners could take at least six months and it could be a further year or more before the systems and solutions come into use.

The winners will take on National Payments Corporation of India, the sole pioneering umbrella organization backed by more than 50 retail banks. Its Unified Payments Interface, or UPI, protocol debuted in 2016 and set the digital payments arena afire by allowing users to link their phone numbers to their bank accounts. That made transferring and receiving money via apps as easy as sending a text message, allowing large scale and high volumes of transactions to happen at minimal cost.

“The regulator probably doesn’t want concentration risk as the UPI backbone has become critical to the economy,” said Nandan Nilekani, who conceived and built a biometric identity database the system uses to identify users. “With more licensees and these systems presumably being able to operate seamlessly with each other, the aim seems to be to reinvigorate innovation and push digital payments even deeper into the country,” said Nilekani, co-founder and chairman of IT services company Infosys Ltd.

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Though commissions on digital payments are thin, the volume is potentially huge as India tries to reduce its reliance on cash. Card and mobile payments represented only 21% of $781 billion in retail purchases at brick-and-mortar stores in 2019, according to an estimate by S&P Global Market Intelligence.

The new licensees could make money by charging businesses transaction fees. They can also break new territory by setting up and operating ATMs, point-of-sale systems, remittance services and new innovative payment solutions.

“There seems to be a prime mix of regulatory support and innovation attracting investors to the space right now,” said Anis Uzzaman, general partner and chief executive officer of Silicon Valley-based Pegasus Tech Ventures, an investor in Robinhood and other fintech startups. “A new generation of entrepreneurs is grabbing the opportunity.”

By Saritha Rai