PhonePe and Google Pay, the leading players in India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) ecosystem, have seen their combined market share decline by 4 percentage points over the past year, as newer entrants such as Sachin Bansal’s Navi and Flipkart-backed super.money gained traction through aggressive marketing and user incentives.
The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which oversees the UPI framework, has made incremental progress in its efforts to diversify the market, with the top three apps collectively losing 7 percentage points in market share over the past 18 months.
The top three apps – PhonePe, Google Pay and Paytm – together processed 95.2 percent of all UPI transactions in January 2024, which has come down to 88.3 percent in July 2025.
Sachin Bansal-led Navi, Flipkart-owned super.money and NPCI subsidiary Bhim have all gained market share apart from minor gains from a slew of new entrants over the last year and half.
To be sure, this does not meaningfully reduce the systemic risks and is quite far from the NPCI’s goal of reducing the market share of a single UPI app below 30 percent.
The country’s largest mobile payments firm and IPO-bound PhonePe lost 2.6 percentage points in market share in the last twelve months.
Despite the advances by newer UPI apps, PhonePe still dominates the UPI payments, holding a little over 45 percent market share and does not change the competitive landscape materially
Google Pay, the second largest UPI player with 35.5 percent market share, lost around 1.5 percent during the same period.
However, the top two players together still account for 80 percent of all UPI transactions. UPI is the country’s most popular digital payments facilitating over 20 billion transactions worth around Rs 25 lakh crore every month.
UPI space attracting renewed interest
The rise of Navi and super.money coincides with a renewed interest in the space because of the multiple product launches and customer preference for the platform for digital payments.
One of the country’s largest payment gateway companies Razorpay has made an investment in the UPI app POPclub in June to reward customers for digital payments at third-party merchant websites and apps.
Ecommerce giants Amazon and Flipkart also have their own TPAP licences for in-house UPI payments within their shopping apps. PhonePe was a subsidiary of Flipkart until it was spun off as a separate entity by Walmart in late 2022.
Sachin Bansal, who cofounded Flipkart in 2007, last year entered the UPI fray with Navi, competing with super.money and PhonePe. Incidentally, Bansal played a key role in Flipkart’s acquisition of PhonePe in 2016.
Interestingly, Flipkart launched super.money as a separate company last year to chase fintech and wealth-tech customers through UPI payments.
NPCI’s efforts to reduce concentration
In 2024 alone, 20 companies received the third-party application provider (TPAP) approval from NPCI, which is required to provide customers with the UPI services.
NPCI has been looking to broadbase the UPI user-base to reduce the market concentration and has been actively helping smaller fintech with faster approvals and product innovations.
On December 31, 2024, NPCI extended the market cap rule by two more years, possibly because of the challenges in implementing its policy.
A lot of these newer fintechs are either launching or planning to launch Rupay credit cards that can be linked to UPI, which offers customer rewards of cards and cashbacks on UPI apart from a credit-free period.
Some of the newer entrants include companies providing various financial services such as broking, lending, credit cards, investments and payments. While some are new fintech startups trying to break into the scene, some of the players are large companies looking to keep their existing customers on the app with various financial services products.
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