NPCI, startups brainstorm on ways to mitigate concentration risk on UPI

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

smaller players on Unified Payments Interface (UPI) to enabling a sort of reservation system among third-party apps to help the weaker ones grow, multiple ideas came up during a meeting on Tuesday between the payments industry and the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) which runs UPI.

“NPCI mainly wanted to understand how they can enable smaller apps to grow on UPI and help distribute the load from the top three players to others in the market,” said a senior industry executive on the condition of anonymity.

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The executive further added that participants cited the example of the government-backed zero MDR support scheme on RuPay debit cards which have definitely helped the card payments space to see significant inroads for the domestic card scheme.

To break the duopoly of American payment giants Mastercard and Visa, the government has incentivised the use of NPCI-backed RuPay debit cards. One suggestion was to imagine a similar supporting scheme on UPI too.

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“The large players on UPI have massive financial support and technical prowess, so even in terms of features there is nothing that smaller players can do and they will not