Amazon’s digital payment offering, Amazon Pay, is reportedly moving to its own app in a bid to take advantage of the digital payment boom that is taking shape in India.
TechCrunch revealed that the e-commerce giant will look to move Amazon Pay to a singular platform in order to become a seamless, standalone payment method. The current iteration of the payment method is integrated within the India Amazon app.
Amazon Pay allows users to transfer money to users and merchants, pay for goods on the e-commerce site and pay bills. The payment platform also enables investment opportunities for Indian consumers.
This comes after months of contemplating the move from Amazon execs, who have already reached out to the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) for its standalone launch.
Amazon Pay will likely have to issue new UPI IDs to new users which TechCrunch revealed is something of a ‘thorny’ requirement for the company.
Despite this, one of the primary reasons for moving the payment method to its standalone app is that Amazon reportedly believes it is not receiving enough attention.
The digital payment space is experiencing a massive influx of new digital payment methods from some of the largest tech companies in the world now, including Apple and Google.
There is no doubt that Amazon will be feeling stiff competition from the likes of Google and Apple in the digital payment and wallet space. Amazon Pay currently ranks sixth as the most popular payment method on India’s extremely popular Unified Payments Interface (UPI).
Pratiksha Pathak, Head of Payment Services at RedCompass Labs, hailed the innovation UPI is bringing to Indians and believes that more can be done for the US’ payment rails.
He said: “Countries like India and Brazil continue to push boundaries with their payments innovations, revolutionising the way people and businesses transact and leaving the developed world in their wake.
“By enabling free and fast account-to-account transfers, they have enabled the interoperability of instant payments across bank, card, mobile money and ATM rails.
“As the world marches towards 24/7 instant payments, the lessons from UPI are crystal clear: the US must create the right environment for instant payments to flourish. That means developing an interoperable, free, and easy-to-use instant payment scheme that fosters innovation and boosts financial inclusivity.”
