One of India’s legacy business conglomerates, the Tata group, is reportedly venturing into the country’s flourishing digital payments industry.
The century-old behemoth awaits the National Payments Corporation of India’s (NPCI) approval to begin operations through the flagship unified payments interface (UPI) as a third-party payments service provider, The Economic Times reported today (March 16), citing sources.
“The Tatas…are hoping it can go live next month,” the newspaper said.
Tata Digital, the group’s digital commerce entity, is reportedly in talks with ICICI Bank, one of India’s biggest private lenders, to power its UPI infrastructure.
Stiff competition for other digital payment platforms
The Tatas’ foray into digital payments means the competition increases for Google Pay, PhonePe, Amazon Pay, Paytm, and others. The move, however, is likely to increase interoperability among UPI users and foster innovation and inclusion in the payments space.
“Most big techs are leveraging their existing consumer base and behavioural data collected over the years to develop better payments solutions,” PwC had said in a digital payment trends report in 2021.
UPI, meanwhile, has grown exponentially over the past years. In February this year alone, it completed 4.5 billion transactions amounting to over 8.26 lakh crore rupees ($108.3 billion) in value.
Currently, there are 23 third-party apps registered under NPCI that partner with 10 Indian banks to get access to UPI bandwagon.