'The Indian consumer is moving so quickly and they have so many options.'
Amazon Pay UPI has crossed 100 million customers, with the online platform used mainly for e-commerce transactions, utility bill payments and mobile recharges, the company announced on Monday.
Amazon India unveiled a dedicated marketplace section highlighting products with reduced tax burdens as the goods and services tax (GST) restructuring took effect on September 22, positioning the ecommerce giant to capitalise on lower consumer prices across electronics, appliances, and other categories. Its rival Flipkart, too, has rolled out its own GST-focused storefront, the GST Bachat Utsav, aimed at helping shoppers maximise benefits from the new tax rates across multiple categories.
With over 80 million Unified Payments Interface (UPI) users, Amazon Pay, the payments business of e-commerce giant Amazon, has been growing at 40-50 per cent year-on-year (Y-o-Y), said Mahendra Nerurkar, chief executive officer (CEO) and vice-president (V-P), Amazon Pay India. "Leveraging just the micro peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions on UPI is not a business model. "While we have enabled those features, we do not chase monthly active users based on this.
Amazon customers can now use their Rs 2,000 notes to top up their Amazon Pay balances during cash-on-delivery orders, as it offers a doorstep solution to ease the stress of exchanging such currency. Customers can deposit cash of up to Rs 50,000 per month, including notes of Rs 2,000 denomination, Amazon said. The cash load at doorstep service by Amazon Pay is helping consumers convert high-value notes for digital transactions.
UPI has catapulted India into the forefront on the global digital payments landscape. Working hand in hand, the AePS payments system is making life easy for rural folks, notes Tamal Bandyopadhyay.
At 250 million unique visitors a month, MX Player has for long been in the same bracket as YouTube (454 million) and Meta (324 million) in reach.
'If you are not prudent, you may exceed your budget, and if it happens too often, you may end up in debt.'
Some of the fintechs that will get impacted include Cred, Paytm, Phonepe and Amazon Pay, among others.
'Forget 80 crores, we haven't even negotiated for the wedding video.'
Flipkart-backed fintech firm super.money is aiming to be among the top five players on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) leaderboard by the end of this year, a senior company executive has said. The company, which rolled out its beta version in June this year, has processed about 10 million transactions till date. "We have a target of 100 million transactions for the end of the year.
With digital adoption fast gaining currency, India is likely to see retail digital payments double to $7 trillion by 2030 from current levels, a study by Kearney and Amazon Pay said. In the report 'How Urban India Pays', Kearney-Amazon Pay said strong adoption of digital payments in online purchases has potentially led to a permanent shift in consumer behaviours, fuelling offline adoption as well.
Major credit issuers, including the largest - HDFC Bank - have integrated their systems with the Bharat Bill Payment Systems (BBPS) for receiving credit card repayments via third-party applications.
Ecommerce firm Amazon has infused ~1,600 crore into its India entity Amazon Seller Services, according to its regulatory filings. The funding comes at a time when the company is seeing opportunities in emerging geographies, including India. The regulatory filings are dated April 15. This is the second time in five months that Amazon invested in its India arm Amazon Seller Services. Before this, Amazon had infused over ~1,000 crore into its Indian entity this year.
Walmart-owned fintech firm PhonePe said it has crossed 500 million lifetime registered users on its platform. With this milestone, 1 in 3 Indians are now on PhonePe. The company said it is the first Indian internet company to have reached this scale globally. This milestone has been achieved in just over 7 years since the PhonePe UPI (Unified Payments Interface) payments launched in August 2016.
PhonePe said on Tuesday it has launched a service that will allow the fintech firm's Indian users traveling abroad to pay foreign merchants using Unified Payments Interface (UPI). 'UPI international' supports merchant outlets in UAE, Singapore, Mauritius, Nepal and Bhutan that have a local QR (quick response) code. Users will be able to make direct payments in a foreign currency from their Indian bank, like they do with international debit cards.
Several Indian traders, hawkers, as well as transport and gig workers' unions will join a global campaign by Make Amazon Pay coalition happening across close to 40 countries on Black Friday to protest alleged exploitative practices by the tech giant. Employees in the US, the UK, India, Japan, Australia, South Africa and across Europe are demanding better wages and working conditions as the cost-of-living crisis deepens, as part of the campaign. Trade unions, including Bharatiya Udyog Vyapar Mandal, Hawkers' Joint Action Committee, Gig Workers' Association, and All India People Science Network, will join the campaign.
The FIR was lodged at the Sector 20 police station on Thursday after the complainant, a Noida resident, alleged that her Amazon Prime account got hacked and the problem remains unresolved despite assurance from Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, an official statement said.
'Building a whole product with the railways was challenging; we had to figure out how to load and unload a train when it stops for only about five minutes at a station.' 'We also helped them understand the revenues this would generate for them.'
Walmart-owned digital payments firm PhonePe has decided to halt its proposed acquisition of Goldman Sachs- and Xiaomi-backed ZestMoney, a Bengaluru-based buy now, pay later (BNPL) platform. The deal, which was poised to fetch anywhere between $150-200 million and $300 million, has hit a snag over lapses in due diligence, disagreements over valuation, sustainability of the business, and shareholding structure of ZestMoney, according to people familiar with the matter. The collapse of the deal is also being attributed to a slowdown in the financial technology (fintech) sector in the midst of a funding winter, difficult regulatory environment, and macroeconomic uncertainty, informed other sources.
In March this year, Worldline India launched Vabox (Voice Alert Box): merchants will now get instant audio alerts on the settlement of UPI (Unified Payments Interface) payments via QR codes in languages of their choice when customers check out. "They needn't worry whether the amount has been credited to their account," says Gulshan Pruthi, the firm's executive vice-president. The French payments giant will roll out 500,000 Vaboxes in the initial phase.
While players like Paytm, MobiKwik, and PhonePe allow you to buy gold for Rs 1, Amazon Pay has kept the minimum amount at Rs 5. Digital gold is essentially an avenue for investing in physical gold.
If you are running a sweetmeat shop, will you manage a dairy for milk supply or buy milk from the market? Banks are running a dairy (which has its cost for processing milk), while NBFCs are buying milk from the market, observes Tamal Bandyopadhyay.
The size of the Indian financial services market could touch around $340 billion in the next few years.
A day after getting permission to raise its Unified Payments Interface (UPI) user base to 100 million, WhatsApp on Thursday said it has plans to make significant investments in 'payments on WhatsApp' across India, including India-first features and driving adoption. The company, however, did not share details of its plans. The Meta-owned messaging app got its first greenlight for its payments service from the National Payments Council of India (NPCI) in November 2020 with a cap of 20 million users. A year later, in November 2021, the limit was raised to 40 million users.
Apart from air travel, Flipkart would also be able to offer train bookings through Cleartrip.
With the arrival of new players such as Amazon Pay, Google Tez and Flipkart's PhonePe, digital money companies are now changing their business pitch.
Yes Bank customers will be able to access full banking services from Wednesday evening, as the moratorium will be lifted earlier. The RBI had on March 5 put a moratorium on Yes Bank restricting withdrawals to Rs 50,000 per depositor till April 3. However, the government in a notification on Saturday said the moratorium will be lifted by 18:00 hrs on March 18.
Probe has allegedly found calculation errors by Amazon. The company paid higher GST but instead of claiming refund took wrong input tax credit.
'Investors with as little as Rs 1 can start investing in digital gold.'
In the excitement over the allocation of bank licences for the private sector, a new category of licence offered by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) last year went almost unnoticed. That was when the RBI consolidated the rules for prepaid payment instruments (PPI), popularly understood as e-wallets or gift cards. In the process, the regulator has fast-forwarded a bottom-up card usage industry in India that is completely different from the world of bank-linked credit and debit cards.
'For all of us at Amazon, it is 'Bharat first'.' 'We are keeping the Indian customer at the centre of what we are doing.'
'There will be partnerships between banks and fintech firms, but there will also be areas where they will be direct competitors.'
These top two apps account for more than 78 per cent of the UPI market in terms of volume of transaction, and 86 per cent of the market by value of transactions in December.
Amazon's fresh investment in its India entities come at a time when the Seattle-based firm has faced losses in several of its business entities in India, such as seller services, wholesale, transportation services and digital payments, for the 2018-19 financial year.
WhatsApp on Wednesday said it expects to facilitate the purchase of "affordable sachet-sized" health insurance through its platform by the end of the year as part of its efforts to provide users in India with greater access to financial solutions. The Facebook-owned company noted that its 'Payments' feature is now available to users across the country (currently up to 20 million users) with support from banking partners - State Bank of India, HDFC, ICICI and Axis Bank.
Amazon India Country Head Amit Agarwal refers to all talk of mergers as 'noise'. 'All this is a distraction, when the focus should be on the customer,' he says.
70 per cent of surveyed respondents have experienced job related issues in the past 3 months.
Urvi Malvania looks at what is in store for the IPL's 2019 edition.
© 2026 Rediff.com - Investor Information - Advertise with us - Disclaimer - Privacy Policy - Sitemap - Feedback - About us - Terms of use - Grievances