Amazon pay eyes to capture India’s growing UPI market: Amazon Pay CEO

Progressive regulator: India’s growing digital payment market has attracted natural attention from international biggies like Amazon Pay. In an exclusive interview with Republic Business, Mahendra Nerurkar, Vice President and CEO of Amazon Pay, says that with RBI’s progressive stance on regulation, the field is now leveled for global players in the payments space.

"I think a lot of growth in the digital economy would not have been possible without the progressive regulations," Nerurkar added.  

"When you see this kind of radical growth, we need to define the rules of the game," he added.   Nerurkar explained that it's because of RBI progressive regulations that doing KYC yourself is a lot easier today than it was before.  "Doing recurring payments is a whole lot easier and accessible today.  

Similarly, card tokenisation enables you to save cards in a trusted way, this is all because of regulations," he added. Currently, Amazon Pay serves around 13,000 merchants as payment aggregators online as well as offline. Besides basic payment processing and payment settlement, Amazon Pay also offers wallet service. Growing UPI volume Amazon Pay, which recently got payment aggregators license is eyeing growth in UPI volume. "For us growing UPI volume is important for a couple of reasons as it is the simplest way for a large set of customers to pay," VP and CEO of Amazon Pay told Republic Business. 

He added further that apart from focusing on growing volume, the next focus area for Amazon Pay now is P2P which includes money transfers and scan pay. "P2P is where we have been little late, that is where the team has invested a lot of energy, "Nerurkar said. Talking about UPI growth he added, "Amazon Pay is seeing a healthy growth in UPI on shopping and bills." 

Challenges Ahead 

Throwing light on the challenges, Nerurkar said that the rate at which digital adoption rate is growing the biggest concern for us is frauds. "As the technology is getting smarter, so do the fraudsters, '' he quipped. According to him, continuously staying ahead of the curve in terms of fraud prevention leveraging ML and AI is the biggest challenge. As far as the business of credit is concerned, the second big challenge is responsible lending. 

Existing opportunity 

He went on to explain that extending credit to underserved customers is a big opportunity for Amazon Pay as only 3-4 per cent customers in India are having credit cards.