Amazon Pay Banks On Mobile Wallets To Make A Dent In India's Consumer Payments Sector

Amazon Pay, the e-commerce giant’s digital payment division, aims to leverage its traditional mobile wallet service to reestablish itself in the consumer payment market.

What Happened? Per an Economic Times report, Amazon believes interoperability — the ability of its wallet to interact with any QR code in India — will boost transactions and somewhat flip its fortunes.

As of April 2023, Amazon Pay had established 62.8 million wallets, as per Reserve Bank of India data. However, only 3.8 million transactions were reported that month. In contrast, Paytm Payments Bank boasts more than 500 million wallets.

Amazon Pay also lags in Unified Payments Interface (UPI)-based transactions, recording 57 million transactions in May 2023. Nevertheless, Amazon aims to capitalize on its 100+ million registered users in India for increased usage of its platform.

See also: NPCI, AI4Bharat To Enable Voice-Based Payments For Feature Phones: What You Need To Know

Wallet Play: Vikas Bansal, director at Amazon Pay India, acknowledged that the company’s challenge lies in enhancing transaction share among its extensive customer base. To address this, Amazon created a shortcut to facilitate direct access to the Amazon Pay micro app from the home screen, potentially promoting user adoption.

Moreover, Amazon plans to encourage its wallet customers to use the app more frequently for daily transactions. Bansal emphasised that over 70% of daily UPI transactions are below ₹500, suggesting many users prefer using a wallet for these payments to maintain their bank accounts uncluttered.

Interestingly, except for Google, both Amazon and WhatsApp — owned by Meta, have struggled to affect India’s consumer payments business in a big way.

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