The National Payments Corporation of India announces a long-term agreement with the Indian Institute of Science for conducting joint research on blockchain and artificial intelligence. The partnership will also foster further innovation by establishing the 'NPCI-IISc Centre of Excellence for Deep Tech Research and Development.'

One of the oldest and premier institutes for pioneering advanced technological research in India is IISc.

The collaboration between NPCI and the reputed institute is aimed at solving complex technological and engineering problem statements in the areas of scalability, privacy-preserving designs, neural networks, Graph AI, Large Language Models (LLM), etc.

Creating specialized incentive structures for small players on the Unified Payments Interface to enable a reservation system among third-party apps to help the weaker ones grow; multiple ideas emerged to mitigate the concentration risk on the UPI.

The main goal of NPCI was to understand how they can help smaller apps grow on UPI and spread the load from the top three players to other players in the market.

Government-backed zero MDR support scheme on RuPay debit cards has helped the card payments space to see significant inroads for the domestic card scheme, according to participants at the meeting.

Walmart-backed PhonePe and Google Pay have around an 80 percent market share in the UPI-based payments market. The remaining market share was held by Paytm.

The partnership will focus on scalable blockchain platforms and multi-modal analytics over fintech data, according to NPCI.

The large players on UPI have massive financial support and technical prowess, so even in terms of features there is nothing that smaller players can do, and they will not replicate quickly. There is no differentiation that can be created in terms of products.