The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) granted approval to WhatsApp to roll out UPI (Unified Payments Interface)-powered payments in the country.

The Facebook-owned service said that it is rolling out payments in ten Indian regional languages in the latest stable version of WhatsApp app on Android and iOS, Bloomchain.ru reports.

WhatsApp has been testing payments features in India for almost two years. According to NPCI, India is WhatsApp’s largest market with over 400 million users.


NPCI, that operates the UPI payments infrastructure, granted approval to Facebook to launch WhatsApp Pay in February 2020. The service has been in a beta-testing phase for two years now. NPCI said WhatsApp 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.

It is noteworthy that NPCI’s announcement 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. While WhatsApp is unlikely to be affected by these restrictions, Google and Walmart, who currently dominate the mobile payments market in India, together commanding roughly 80% of the UPI market share, may experience some problems.

India’s digital payments industry is considered to be one of the most promising. According to Statista portal, the total transaction value in the digital payments segment will exceed $69 billion by the end of 2020, and by the end of 2024 - $141 billion. Swiss financial services holding company, Credit Suisse, estimates the market to be worth $200 billion. Moreover, Credit Suisse believes that the total digital payment market will grow to $1 trillion within four years.

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