After two years of testing, WhatsApp payment service on Thursday, 5 November, received approval from National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) to go live on Unified Payment Interface (UPI) in the multi-bank model.
The company will be allowed to rollout in a “graded manner” the NPCI said, and it will first be allowed to do so with a maximum of 20 million registered users in UPI.
To compare, PhonePe recently announced that it has hit the 250 million user mark.
The NPCI’s approval came on the same day it limited the transactions a third-party app like WhatsApp Pay can carry out to 30% of the total volume on the UPI network.
The move is expected to allay fears of regulatory authorities including the Reserve Bank of India over potential monopoly risks.
WhatsApp has been offering the service on a trial basis in India since February 2018.
WhatsApp Pay will also put significant pressure on India’s payments market leaders PhonePe, owned by Walmart, Google Pay and Paytm, the Indian company backed by Alibaba and SoftBank.
Facebook is trying to facilitate more shopping on its apps, allowing it to harness new data around user spending patterns and boosting its ability to target advertising.
