FACEBOOK owned Whatsapp coming up with UPI in India
WhatsApp has already began testing its payments service in India with 1 million users in the 2018. Now, it has finally started to expand the feature to more users in the world’s second largest internet market.
Whatsapp owner updated status on Friday that it is rolling out payments in ten Indian regional languages in the latest stable version of WhatsApp app on both Android and iOS. The announcement comes hours after National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the body that operates the popular UPI payments infrastructure, said that it had granted approval to WhatsApp to roll out UPI-powered payments in the country.
Their is no news yet related to the whatsapp wallet yet but soon it seems like whatsapp can come up with this idea as well. Their is a massive challenge to all the other UPI apps in the sector including paytm, GooglePay, PhonePe and even government owned Bhim UPI.
Already Google, Samsung and a number of other firms has called up with their UPI service, Now WhatsApp has built its payments service 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. (WhatsApp said today it is working with five leading banks in India: ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, Axis Bank, the State Bank of India, and Jio Payments Bank).
Google and Walmart currently dominate the mobile payments market in India, together commanding roughly 80% 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. UPI’s popularity has diminished the relevance of several firms in India, including SoftBank and Alibaba-backed Paytm that spent years building mobile wallets. Unlike UPI apps, mobile wallets are not interoperable with other mobile wallets, and levy a small fee to consumers.
Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, in a video posted Friday said that “With UPI, India has created something truly special and is opening up a world of opportunities for micro and small businesses that are the backbone of the Indian economy. India is the first country to do anything like this. I’m glad we were able to support this effort and work together to help achieve a more digital India. I want to thank all our partners who’ve made this possible. When people can access financial tools, they’re more empowered to support themselves and others, or start a business. Long term, we need more innovation that gives people control over their money, and making payments easier is a small step that can really help,”.
NPCI’s announcement today comes minutes after it said it would be enforcing a cap on third-party apps to ensure that no single app processes more than 30% of all UPI transactions in a month. It’s evident that WhatsApp has already suffered too much because of regulatory troubles in India, its biggest market by users. But NPCI’s plan to enforce limit on other apps should help WhatsApp in some way eventually — though return to bite again later.