Amazon Pay India bats for fair MDR on UPI payments to small merchants

The implementation of a merchant discount rate (MDR) for Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions is essential for smaller players to receive a fair share for the value they add to the payment ecosystem, said a top executive of Amazon Pay, the digital payments arm of ecommerce major Amazon.

“We have been advocating for a fair value exchange between merchants and consumers or customers and banks, and we are also advocating that some sort of MDR should exist (for UPI transactions),” said Vikas Bansal, CEO of Amazon Pay India, on Tuesday. “It already exists for credit cards on UPI or credit lines on UPI. But it should also come up for bank accounts, so that everybody gets to have a little bit of share for the value they add in the ecosystem.”