WhatsApp, which began testing its payments service in India with 1 million users in early 2018, can finally start to expand the feature to more users in the world’s second largest internet market.
National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the body that operates the widely popular UPI payments infrastructure, said on Thursday evening that it has granted approval to WhatsApp to roll out UPI-powered payments in India.
Like Google, Samsung, and a number of other firms, WhatsApp has built its payments service atop UPI, a payments infrastructure built by a coalition of large banks in India. NPCI said WhatsApp, which has amassed over 400 million users in India, can expand payments to its users in a “graded manner” and to start with, it can only roll out the payments service to 20 million users and has to work with multiple banking partners.
A WhatsApp spokesperson in India did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Google and Walmart currently dominate the mobile payments market in India with roughly 40% of the UPI market share. UPI has emerged as the most popular digital payments method in India, thanks in part to New Delhi’s abrupt move to invalidate more than 85% of the paper cash circulation in the nation in late 2016.
More to follow…
