A union representing India's largest public bank along with a coalition of labour unions and NGOs requested the Reserve Bank of India to reject applications of "profit-making" big companies, especially Amazon, from setting up alternate payment systems. Reuters reported on this first on April 8. Amazon, Google, Facebook and others have applied to set up New Umbrella Entity (NUE) — a parallel payment ecosystem proposed by RBI to reduce concentration risks in the payment sector. This would rival the quasi-public National Payment Corporation of India (NPCI), which is currently the main operator for digital transactions in the country. State-run State Bank of India's union All India State Bank of India Staff Federation (AISBISF), labour unions and NGOs under the banner of UNI Global Union, IT for Change and the Joint Action Committee Against Foreign Retail and E-Commerce (JACAFRE) wrote a letter in this regard to the RBI. The letter, reviewed by the MediaNama, urged the RBI to scrap the licensing process of NUE and to reject the application of the Amazon consortium because it "lacks the record of fairness and integrity as mandatorily required for approval of application under the framework" and also because the company is under scrutiny by the Enforcement Directorate and Competition Commission of India. "We look at the existing digital payment interoperability platforms like the UPI, regulated by the RBI, to be like a natural monopoly. While innovation in the digital payment segments can take place in the periphery, when it comes to interoperability there should…
