(New Delhi)WhatsApp Allowed to Roll on Payments Services
National Payments Corporation of India (#NPCI).Allows #WhatsApp to Roll payments services
In India, WhatsApp – which counts India as its biggest market with over 400 million users – will compete with players like Paytm, Google Pay, Walmart-owned PhonePe and Amazon Pay.
In 2018, the Facebook-owned company had started testing its UPI-based payments service in India, which allows users to utilise the messaging platform to send and receive money.
In June this year, WhatsApp had launched ‘WhatsApp Pay’ in Brazil – making it the first country where the service was widely rolled out.
Interestingly, the approval for WhatsApp came on the same day as NPCI limited a single third party like WhatsApp or its rivals like Google Pay or Walmart’s PhonePe to handle only 30 per cent of overall UPI transaction volumes by putting a cap. This is expected to allay fears of potential monopolisation.
Recently, #PhonePe had announced crossing the 250 million registered user milestone and over 100 million monthly active users (MAU), and had 835 million UPI transactions in October with a market leading share of over 40 per cent.
#Google had 67 million monthly active users in September last year, and on the merchant side, it had over three million active merchant’s data for June 2020. Google Pay has not shared any updated stats since September 2019.
#UPI processed over 2.07 billion transactions in October (worth Rs 3.86 lakh crore), up from over 1.8 billion in the previous month, as per data from NPCI.