Amazon Takes On Google's India Payments Dominance With Mobile Wallet Strategy

This article was first published on the Benzinga India Portal.

Amazon.com, Inc's AMZN's digital payment division aims to leverage its traditional mobile wallet service to reestablish itself in the consumer payment market in India. 

What Happened?  Amazon believes interoperability — the ability of its wallet to interact with any QR code in India — will boost transactions and somewhat flip its fortunes, according to an Economic Times report.

As of April 2023, Amazon Pay had established 62.8 million wallets, according to Reserve Bank of India data. 

However, only 3.8 million transactions were reported that month. In contrast, Paytm Payments Bank, an Indian rival, boasts more than 500 million wallets.

Amazon Pay also lags in Unified Payments Interface (UPI)-based transactions, recording 57 million transactions in May 2023. Nevertheless, Amazon aims to capitalize on its 100+ million registered users in India for increased usage of its platform.

See also: NPCI, AI4Bharat To Enable Voice-Based Payments For Feature Phones: What You Need To Know

Wallet Play: Vikas Bansal, director at Amazon Pay India, acknowledged that the company’s challenge lies in enhancing transaction share among its extensive customer base. 

To address this, Amazon India created a shortcut to facilitate direct access to the Amazon Pay micro app from the home screen, potentially promoting user adoption.

Moreover, Amazon plans to encourage its Indian wallet customers to use the app more frequently for daily transactions. Bansal emphasized that over 70% of daily UPI transactions are below INR 500 ($6.10) suggesting many users prefer using a wallet for these payments to keep their bank accounts uncluttered.

Interestingly, except for Alphabet Inc. GOOGL GOOG subsidiary Google, both Amazon and WhatsApp — owned by Meta Platforms, have struggled to affect India’s consumer payments business in a big way.

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