In Brief: NPCI mulls market share restriction for third-party UPI apps

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) could place a restriction on the market share of third-party UPI apps, such as PhonePe and Google Pay, to prevent systemic risks stemming from a single platform and the emergence of duopoly or monopoly on the whole interface, The Economic Times reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The organization, according to these people, may moderate the induction of new customers for the apps when they close in on an allowed limit of 30%. It plans to hold consultations with the involved stakeholders in the next 40-45 days to discuss this limit, the report added.

Paytm Gold grows 100%, supports transactions worth Rs 1 cr

Homegrown payments unicorn Paytm said it has registered 100% growth in digital gold transactions in the past six months. The company said that the number of new users on the platform has grown by 50% while the average order volume has increased 60%, taking the total volume of gold transactions up to 5,000 kg. Moving ahead, Paytm said, it will extend the gold services to the Paytm Money app and will also allow users to buy/sell gold worth up to Rs 1 crore in a single transaction. Previously, the limit to buy gold on the Vijay Shekhar Sharma-led platform was capped at Rs 2 lakh per transaction.

Mitron TV strengthens leadership team

Mitron TV, the startup that looked to fill the TikTok void with its homegrown short video platform Mitron, announced the appointment of two senior members in its leadership team - Shyamanga Barooah and Biswarup Gooptu. Barooah comes from ByteDance with over 20 years of experience in journalism, content creation and management, and will take the position of content strategy head. Gooptu, on the other hand, will join as the head of partnerships and policy. He brings over 15 years of journalism experience to the company, a statement said.

Birlasoft, Namaste Credit partner to boost lending operations

Pune-based software company Birlasoft announced a strategic partnership with fintech company Namaste Credit. The company said it will leverage Namaste Credit’s AI and automation platform to provide its banking and non-banking clients with benefits, such as attracting high-value customers, reducing loan application review time by 90% and enabling fully digital onboarding. The deal will help lenders streamline their operations and data management while leveraging their existing systems and processes, the company said.

Indium collaborates with Denodo to accelerate digital transformation

Chennai headquartered IT services company Indium Software said it has partnered with Palo Alto, California-based Denodo to deploy data virtualisation capabilities. The move, Indium said, will enable enterprise users across sectors to easily access data from varied sources, such as databases, legacy systems and new sources like big data, web, social media and cloud. This would help them make decisions on time, reduce costs and improve overall business performance, it said. It would also help businesses accelerate cloud data modernization programmes and deliver data-driven enterprise capabilities, the company said.