Amazon wants to increase the number of people using Amazon Pay in India, therefore the e-commerce behemoth is thinking of turning its payments services into a stand-alone app, according to three people with knowledge of the situation who spoke with TechCrunch.
Currently available in India through the company’s main e-commerce app, Amazon Pay enables users to pay bills, buy insurance and trip tickets, invest in mutual funds and digital gold, transfer money to people and merchants, and buy travel tickets.
According to two of the insiders, the American tech giant has been considering severing its payments service from the e-commerce app for approximately a year and plans to move forward with the idea in the upcoming months.
According to some Amazon executives, the e-commerce space is not giving enough attention to Amazon Pay.app, a source claimed, adding that a different app with a specific purpose would benefit in the payments platform’s increased national popularity. Since the conversations are continuing and sensitive, the sources asked to remain anonymous. They issued a warning, pointing out that Amazon might change its plans or decide to scrap the project because it is facing numerous other difficulties in India.A representative for Amazon declined to comment, calling the reports speculative.The most common online payment method used by Indians is the Unified Payments Interface, where Amazon Pay is ranked sixth among apps. According to official figures, Amazon Pay handled over 72.4 million transactions in July, or roughly 0.5% of all transactions on the network. By contrast, Google Pay handled 5.3 billion transactions, and Walmart’s PhonePe handled 6.9 billion.
Amazon is hardly the only company considering comparable possibilities in India, where superapp efforts a la China have not been very successful. Two years after splitting from PhonePe, its main Indian competitor, Flipkart, combined its financial products into a single vertical late last month.
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