India lines up banks for e-commerce to take on Amazon

India’s effort to break Amazon Inc and Walmart Inc’s dominance of its e-commerce sector, by laying out its own open network, has begun lining up banks and other key players expected to push it forward, sources familiar with the matter said.

Some of India’s greatest banks are in discussions about setting up “buyer platforms” to allow their clients to place orders for goods and services over the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), which the Indian government soft-launched in April, the sources told Reuters.

The progress of the organization, which would guarantee equal access to every online seller and purchaser no matter what their size, is vital for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who faces pressure from private companies to act against the outsized influence of Amazon and Walmart’s Flipkart in India’s e-commerce.

Policymakers in different nations also are taking a look at ways of getting control over enormous tech organizations’ dominance of online purchases.

“If you look at the seller side, anyone who can make their digital catalog visible using this common language will approach a huge pool of buyers shared across applications,” ONDC Chief Executive T. Koshy said about the organization. “It is not generally controlled by one large company.”