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Comment by pritambarhate | Hacker News Reader

Should have done 3-4 years ago. Now there are at least 3 apps fighting for leadership in payments: PayTM, Google Pay and PhonePe. Will be hard for Whatsapp to break into.

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No single app can dominate the market because National Payments Corporation of India has decided to impose a cap on transactions that a single payment application can process.

https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/npci-imposes-cap-on-...

They all use UPI too which means there isn't a vendor lock-in similar to paypal.

Government may also remove wallets (which aren't part of UPI) completely in future through regulation.

There is currently a new law regarding this. RBI has mandated that Wallets without balance for 12 Months would be deactivated.

This is pretty consumer-unfriendly. Users are forced to use a different app if their chosen app has 30% market share?

Agree, that this sounds pretty consumer-unfriendly on the surface. But I think the law is fascinating, because of how effective it (might) be in limiting monopolies. Applying the same law to online advertisement or search engine market share would probably be a benefit for the consumers.

How?! After reaching 100 million searches in a month, Google should stop serving search queries? How weird would that be?

If you’ve already reached your 30% cap, what incentive do you have to improve your service?

>If you’ve already reached your 30% cap, what incentive do you have to improve your service?

By having to compete with other services who are trying to get your share?

This doesn’t sound very enforceable. Say users flock to WhatsApp. “Sorry, we can’t process your payment because people like you aren’t using competitor services enough. Please try again next month.” ???

Couldn’t they process the payment on someone else’s rails?

I'd assume they'd just have to throttle users.

I would prefer opening a different app to complete the payment than living in a society where payment space is completely dominated by one company

They have been trying for 2 years but were blocked by the government.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/6/21552325/whatsapp-payment...

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