NEW DELHI: WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned messaging platform, on Friday launched its payment feature for users across India, the world’s second-largest Internet market.
It received approval from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) to go live on the country’s Unified Payments Interface, which enables transactions with over 160 supported banks, the company said on its blog.
The payments feature is available in 10 Indian regional language versions of the platform, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said. The US company can gradually expand its payment base starting with as many as 20 million users, according to the NPCI.
With more than 400 million active users, India is the biggest market for WhatsApp, and the company is expected to corner a significant share of users on UPI given its popularity.
India has over 718 million Internet users, the second-largest in the world. WhatsApp had launched its first payments service in Brazil in June, but the central bank had quickly ordered its suspension, according to reports.
Google Pay and Walmart’s Phone Pe dominate the mobile payments market in India, each controlling nearly 40 per cent of the UPI market share, domestic media reported.
UPI is the most dominant digital payments method in India, partly because of the government’s demonetisation measure that scrapped 86 per cent of the paper cash in circulation in November 2016.
Facebook had been testing WhatsApp payments and awaiting regulatory clearances in India since early 2018, and the launch represents another major move by the media giant in India. In April, Facebook announced a $5.7-billion investment in Reliance Jio Platforms to digitise more than 60 million small businesses. — dpa
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