Chennai: WhatsApp today said it is commencing its payments services in India after receiving nod from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).
“Starting today, people across India will be able to send money through WhatsApp. This secure payments experience makes transferring money just as easy as sending a message. People can safely send money to a family member or share the cost of goods from a distance without having to exchange cash in person or going to a local bank,” WhatsApp said in a blogpost.
It added that the payments feature has been designed in partnership with NPCI using UPI, an India-first, real-time payment system that enables transactions with over 160 supported banks.
On Thursday, NPCI – which runs the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) used for real-time payments between peers or at merchants’ end while making purchases – allowed WhatsApp to start its payments service in the country in a “graded” manner, starting with a maximum registered user base of 20 million in UPI.
In 2018, the Facebook-owned company had started testing its UPI-based payments service in India, which allows users to utilise the messaging platform to send and receive money. The testing was limited to about a million users as it waited for regulatory approvals to come in.
In June this year, WhatsApp had launched ‘WhatsApp Pay’ in Brazil – making it the first country where the service was widely rolled out.
