NPCI UPI volume cap: NPCI extends proposed 30% UPI market share cap deadline by another two years

In a notification issued on Tuesday, NPCI said that the timeline for compliance for all UPI apps which have a market share of more than 30%, has been extended by two years.

This comes after the NPCI had pushed its initial target around implementing the volume cap by two years back in 2022. The deadline to comply to the rules was December 31, 2024.

“There were multiple conversations that happened with the industry participants and we believe that bringing the market cap at this point could slow down adoption of UPI…there is potential for the payment system to grow by another 10 times,” said a senior banker in the know.

The development will give another two years to Walmart-backed PhonePe and Google Pay to adhere to the caps. These two players boast of around 90% share of the UPI payments market.

In November, NPCI data showed PhonePe processed around 7.4 billion UPI payments and Google Pay processed around 5.7 billion transactions. Overall UPI reported 15.4 billion UPI payments. After PhonePe and Google Pay, there is Paytm followed by the likes of Navi, Cred and others.

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In another development, NPCI has allowed WhatsApp Pay which had a limit of opening up its payment service only for 100 million users, to enable it for its more than 500 million users in India.

While Meta-owned messaging application is one of the largest and the most used applications in the country, currently it has a negligible share of the UPI payments market.