WhatsApp has been working on its own payments platform named WhatsApp Pay since past several months and now the service seems to be all set to launch in the Indian market.
After months of delay, the company has now managed to secure license from National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). With this, the company can now grow its payments service that uses the government’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) to enable mobile transactions.
For those who are unaware, Facebook-owned WhatsApp has been offering WhatsApp Pay to about one million users in India since 2018 as a part of the beta testing. To select users, it has been providing a “Payment” option powered by ICICI Bank.
But due to the lack of approval from the government, it wasn’t able to officially launch the service. In the first phase, the company will be rolling out the payments service to as many as 10 million users in India. WhatsApp has over 400 million users in the Indian market.
With this new service, WhatsApp Pay would compete against the likes of Amazon Pay, Google Pay, and Alibaba-backed Paytm. The development comes at a time when UPI-based transactions in the country has hit the mark of 1.3 billion in December.
