WhatsApp Pay feature approved by NPCI.

National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has approved the WhatsApp messaging app to enter the UPI market in India on November 6, 2020. For this, a new feature of WhatsApp called “WhatsApp Pay” was launched.

Highlights

To launch this feature and to link it with the UPI, WhatsApp has partnered with five banks such as ICICI Bank, Indian Bank, Axis Bank, HDFC Bank and the State Bank of India.  Jio Payment Bank has also been included under the system. Using the feature, anyone can now send  and receive money through WhatsApp using the UPI supported application. The money would be held in the bank account. This messaging platform will just act as a medium to  help transfer the money to other people. The payment feature is powered by UPI. For the security purpose, there would be a person pin verification for every transaction. However, the launch of WhatsApp Pay feature was delayed because it had to comply with the data localisation norms that were introduced by the Reserve Bank of India.

Payment plan

The NPCI allowed the WhatsApp to expand its user base in a phased manner. Initially the service would be available to 2 crore WhatsApp users out of more than 40 crore users of the country. The reason of this is that, NPCI has capped the payments to 30% on total payment volumes pf the transaction done on every third-party payments application.

Concerns

This new feature might hurt the Flipkart owned PhonePe and Google’s GPay payment gateways that holds the command of the 83% of market share.