India, in a bid to curb antitrust concerns, is trying a new strategy, putting a 30 percent cap on what a single player can grab from transactions, Bloomberg reported.
In addition, every player will have to make use of the country’s open payments platform to guarantee interoperability, allowing money be transferred between the country’s over 100 traditional banks and new digital services, including Google Pay, without fees.
With the new rule, India gained the confidence to push through a new WhatsApp payment service, Facebook‘s first effort to boost digital payments for over 1 billion people around the world, Bloomberg reported. Despite WhatsApp having over 400 million users in India, the government caps will make it unable to beat its rivals in India, including local giant Paytm.
Dilip Asbe, CEO of the National Payments Corporation of India, which was set up by the country’s largest retail banks to oversee the infrastructure, said the group had “disallowed a winner-take-all approach” in the name of public good, Bloomberg reported.
The group won’t allow user registrations from either local or foreign sources as it gets close to the 30 percent limit.
India has touted its more methodical approach for some time, including after Chinese regulators stepped in to stop Ant Group‘s proposed double initial public offering (IPO) last month. Ant dominates China’s large digital payment services field, which is rife with numerous innovations. Tencent Holdings also owns a large share of that field, Bloomberg reported, with the duopoly letting those two aforementioned companies expand into other fields, including lending and wealth management.
India’s antitrust regulator has joined the numbers of those targeting Google as of last month, PYMNTS reported. The concern is around how Google Pay is promoted when an Android phone is being set up and if phone companies have choices or not in that matter.
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