SRM University (SRMUH) 
Someone buys chai from a roadside stall, scans a QR code, and eleven rupees move instantly from their account to the vendor’s. No cash, no change, no friction. It happens millions of times a day now, and it’s become so routine that nobody notices the business war running underneath it.
That war is a better business school case than most textbooks manage to write, especially for students comparing the best college for management in India, where learning from current business cases matters as much as learning theory.
Four apps, one rail, zero patience for each other
Four companies fight over the same payment infrastructure:
- Google Pay
- PhonePe
- Paytm
- Amazon Pay
None of them wins anymore by shipping a flashy new feature. Fast, seamless payment is just the baseline now — everyone has that. The real fight is quieter. It’s about who keeps the customer relationship, and who’s worked out how to make money from it without charging for the transaction itself.
Three of the four dominate the numbers. Amazon Pay isn’t one of them, and the company seems entirely unbothered by that. Line all four up and you get a genuinely useful teaching case, because each one answered the same question — how do you profit from a rail that was built to be free — in a completely different way.
Why SRM University students should care about this specific case
This is exactly the kind of live, unresolved problem that separates a strong management program from one still teaching decade-old examples. A good classroom doesn’t hand you the answer. It hands you four companies making four different bets and asks you to figure out who’s actually winning — and why the obvious leader might not be the healthiest business.
At SRM University, cases like this one fit naturally into how strategy and finance get taught together, because the interesting part isn’t who has the most users. It’s who’s built something that survives once the free ride on volume runs out. That’s a more honest way to judge the best college for management in India than scrolling through a placement brochure.
A quick history
- 2016 — UPI launches as shared public infrastructure. Paytm has a head start, carrying over users and habits from the digital-wallet era.
- 2017 — Google Pay arrives as Tez, riding Android’s reach and Google’s patience for running things at a loss.
- Same period — PhonePe spins out of Flipkart, later majority-owned by Walmart, built entirely around UPI from day one.
- February 2019 — Amazon Pay enters last, part of a wallet-and-credit strategy Amazon had quietly been building since 2016.
That lineup barely moved for years. Three apps split nearly the whole market, and Amazon Pay sat at the edges. That’s starting to shift — PhonePe and Google Pay’s combined share fell below 80% for the first time in May 2026, just as regulators edge closer to capping how dominant any single app can become.
Four companies, four different bets
PhonePe leads by a wide margin:
- Holds close to 46.2% of UPI transaction volume as of May 2026
- Preparing for a public listing in India
- Targeting $9–10.5 billion, down from $12 billion privately
- Already delayed its IPO once due to shaky markets
Google Pay plays an entirely different game, since Google’s real profit sits elsewhere:
- Holds 32.7% of UPI volume
- Earns almost nothing directly from peer-to-peer transfers
- UPI was never built to support transaction fees
- Real goal: keep users locked into Chrome, Assistant, Maps, and Android together
Paytm took the harder road:
- Holds just 7.9% of UPI volume
- Turned a genuine profit in FY26, revenue up 22% to ₹8,437 crore
- Payments made up only 55% of revenue in H1 FY26, versus roughly 87% for its closest rival
- Stopped chasing PhonePe’s transaction count years ago
Amazon Pay is the outlier, deliberately:
- Held just 0.38% of UPI volume in May 2026
- Leadership has said market share was never the goal
- Focused instead on wallet-on-UPI and credit lines tied to Amazon checkout
Where the actual money comes from
Core UPI payments are near-zero-margin for both PhonePe and Google Pay — pure volume, barely any direct revenue. Paytm has been shrinking payments as a share of total business on purpose. Amazon Pay keeps this piece small and intentional.
Merchant hardware is Paytm’s real edge. Its Soundbox device — the little box that announces “payment received” out loud — runs as a subscription business at roughly 60% EBITDA margins. That installed base now backs Paytm’s lending arm. PhonePe is pushing into hardware too, though it’s still catching up. Google Pay and Amazon Pay barely bother with it.
Lending is where Paytm made its boldest call. It runs a distribution-only model — connecting merchants and shoppers to lending partners who carry the actual credit risk while Paytm collects a fee just for the introduction. That single decision reshaped the company. It looks less like a payments app now and more like a marketplace for someone else’s credit.
The numbers back it up:
- FY26 EBITDA swung from a ₹1,506 crore loss to a ₹502 crore profit
- Net profit landed at ₹552 crore
Business cases like this are exactly what students expect from the best colleges for management in India with low fees, where practical analysis can often matter more than expensive infrastructure.
PhonePe hasn’t found that same discipline:
- FY26 net loss widened 62% to ₹2,792 crore
- Operating revenue grew 11% to ₹7,920 crore — but costs grew faster
- Scale hasn’t turned into margin, and that’s exactly what investors keep pressing management to explain
Merchants are a different fight altogether
Getting a household to download an app is marketing. Getting a shopkeeper to trust a payment system every single day is an operations problem — and it often decides who actually makes money.
- Paytm bet on hardware and trust, figuring a shopkeeper trusts a box on the counter more than an icon on a screen
- PhonePe and Google Pay bet the opposite way, wagering that free onboarding wins on reach even if margin arrives late
- Amazon Pay barely has to fight for merchants — it’s already sitting inside a checkout millions of shoppers use anyway
What the fight looks like today
Nobody competes on speed anymore. A UPI payment clears in about two seconds or something’s broken. The real competition has moved somewhere customers never see:
- Fraud detection scoring nearly every transaction before it clears
- Credit models built off the same data that used to just move money
- Uptime holding during salary day, festival shopping, the last hour before a bill deadline
Regulation sits over all of it. NPCI floated a 30% market-share cap back in 2020, and that deadline keeps sliding — it currently sits at December 31, 2026. Few expect strict enforcement right on schedule, but nobody’s betting it won’t happen eventually. Each delay has, in practice, cemented the PhonePe-Google Pay duopoly a little further.
Discussions around changing regulations, competition, and profitability are the kind of evolving topics that distinguish the best colleges for MBA in India from programs that rely only on historical case studies.
The real takeaway
Racking up transactions doesn’t automatically build a healthy business. PhonePe proves that better than anyone — leading the charts and losing money at a widening rate, at the same time.
- Paytm turned itself around by building profit centers outside core payments
- Google Pay can afford to ignore monetisation because its parent makes money elsewhere
- Amazon Pay treats payments as support for Amazon’s bigger e-commerce business, not a goal on its own
That’s the whole case in one sentence: strategy needs to align with revenue that lasts, not with market share treated as an achievement by itself.
Which is really the point of studying it at SRM University in the first place. If you’re trying to shortlist the best college for management in India, don’t just scan placement numbers on a brochure. Ask what cases they teach and how current those cases are.
If you’re also comparing the best colleges for BBA in India, the same principle applies. Strong undergraduate programs introduce students to real business situations long before they enter an MBA classroom.
A program still walking students through decade-old examples isn’t preparing anyone for a market moving this fast—and one that’s willing to teach something this unresolved, with numbers still changing quarter to quarter, is usually the one worth paying attention to.
The best college for management in India don’t just explain business models after they’ve succeeded—they teach students how to evaluate them while the story is still unfolding.
The brochure won’t tell you that. The classroom will.
