Adani Group, India's energy and infrastructure giant, is planning a foray into digital payments and e-commerce, a Financial Times report said recently, as the conglomerate looks to diversify its portfolio and compete with Mukesh Ambani's Reliance, Amazon and Walmart's Flipkart and PhonePe.

Adani is considering an application for a license to operate on India's Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and also finalizing the plan for a co-branded credit card with banks, as per the report. UPI stands for Unified Payments Interface. It represents a public digital payments network, now that has become Indians most popular way of transacting online.

This isn't the first time one of the three biggest conglomerates in India- Adani- had shown interest in digital offerings. Last year, the company rolled out a consumer app, Adani One, through which the company sells travel tickets, and the company's CEO Gautam Adani recently dropped hints of "future collaborations" with Uber following the visit of its CEO Dara Khosrowshahi to India.

The conglomerate will use the government-backed Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) platform to provide online shopping, said a person familiar with the matter.
India's retail market is estimated at $1.27 trillion next year, Bernstein analysts said. Reliance Retail runs the largest retail chain in the country and raised capital last year at about $100 billion in valuation.

Flipkart is the largest e-commerce player in the Indian market, which will be expected to account for 10.4% of the country's overall retail sales by next year, Bernstein analysts said. Flipkart secured new funding worth $350 million from Google last week, increasing its valuation to $36 billion. Flipkart rival Amazon plans to deploy about $3 billion to its Indian e-commerce venture over the next few years.

Their product lines, Walmart's PhonePe and Google Pay, account for over 86% of all payments processed in the UPI network, which has more than 12 billion transactions processed monthly. Some of their competition -- and even government bodies -- are not so fond of seeing the likes of Google and Walmart consolidate power over India's mobile payments space, but regulators are currently unmoved.

While Adani's planned payments services would be available through Adani One, FT reported that the Adani Group would first target its several million customer base for new products.

The push into the consumer market follows a tumultuous year for Adani, accused of market manipulation and fraud by U.S. short seller Hindenburg Research. Adani has denied all wrongdoing, but the research firm's reports still caused the group's listed stocks to drop $150 billion in value.