NEW DELHI—Mastercard told the United States government in June that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was using nationalism to promote the use of a domestic payments network, and New Delhi’s protectionist policies were hurting foreign payment companies, a document seen by Reuters showed.
Modi has in recent years backed India’s homegrown payments network “RuPay”, whose rise has broken the dominance of U.S. payment giants such as Mastercard and Visa. More than half of India’s 1 billion debit and credit cards now go through the RuPay payment system, and that means companies such as Mastercard face an uphill task to expand rapidly in one of the world’s biggest payments growth markets.
