Whatsapp is a wide spread messaging app, owned by Facebook is now looking forward to introduce payment feature across the country after getting permission from National Payment Corporation of India.
“Payments is available now in 10 Indian regional language versions of WhatsApp. All you need is a debit card with a bank that supports UPI and you can set it up straight away. You can find it in the latest version of WhatsApp,” Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer at Facebook, was quoted as saying in a statement on Friday. It can be used by Android and iOS users after the latest update on the application.
The NCPI has given permission to WhatsApp to offer payment services via unified payment interface. This ends a two-year wait for WhatsApp Pay, which has so far been operating pilot operations for users in India.
WhatsApp Pay will join an already crowded market of payment services offered via the UPI network. Google Pay, PhonePe, and PayTM are some of the largest processors of UPI payments, apart from applications of individual banks. The permission for WhatsApp pay to go live came on a day when the NPCI also introduced a market share cap of 30% on the volume of UPI transactions starting January 2021.
The payments feature built on the UPI framework “makes it easy for anyone to instantly accept payments across different apps, and for companies to provide people with great services”, Zuckerberg said.
