India: WhatsApp Begins Its Payment Service

On Friday, November 06, 2020, WhatsApp of Facebook Inc. will initiate its much-delayed payment service after obtaining approval from the leading payment processor in the world.

For more than two years, WhatsApp, which counts India as its largest market with far more than 400 million users, has been operating a peer-to-peer payment system with restricted users, pending regulatory approval.

The CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg issued a statement saying, “Payments are available now in 10 Indian regional language versions of WhatsApp.”

For this, WhatsApp has collaborated with five banks situated in India. On Thursday, the National Cooperation of India said, WhatsApp will commence scaling up the business originally with the highest limit of 20 million consumers.

For operations such as peer-to-peer transfer of funds, bill payment, and phone recharge, all widely used payment companies in India utilize the UPI platform, developed by NPCI.

As per NPCI, UPI handled over 2.07 billion transactions in October, growing from over 1.8 billion the prior month.

As said by PwC and  ASSOCHAM Indian corporate lobby group WhatsApp would compete in India’s electronic payment sector with Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Walmart’s PhonePe, and Alibaba-backed Paytm, which is expected to rise more than twice times in value to $135 billion in 2023 from 2019 levels.

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