Tata Group may soon be joining the UPI bandwagon as the Indian conglomerate has sought clearance from NPCI to launch its Unified Payments Interface as part of its wider plans to have a presence in country’s internet economy, The Economic Times reported.
The conglomerate’s digital arm, Tata Digital is in talks with ICICI Bank to power its UPI infrastructure, ET reported quoting its sources. Tata Digital has also carried out discussions with another private sector lender, it added.
“The Tatas have applied to the NPCI to operate as TPAP (Third Party Application Providers) and are hoping it can go live next month,” a source confirmed to the ET.
“They (Tata group) want to have this ready by the time Tata Neu is launched so more UPI payments can be enabled across the superapp with ease,” another person in the know of the matter was quoted in the report.
UPI’ market share has increased significantly over the last few years. From 8.1% in Jan’20, UPI’s market share increased to 11.7% in Mar’21 and 20.3% in Oct 21. Within UPI, non banking apps have fared better; the two biggest players are PhonePe and Google Pay. Their success could be attributed to their technology-focused approach to serve consumers better. Paytm and Facebook-owned WhatsApp Pay are the other prominent apps.
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Launched in 2016, UPI has seen tremendous adoption and cross 1 billion transactions for the first time in October 2019.A year later in October 2020, UPI processed over 2 billion transactions, and in October 2021, it crossed $100 billion in value., according to a report in Times of India.
