After several months of waiting, WhatsApp finally managed to get approval of the National Payments Corporation of India to deploy WhatsApp Pay to 60 million additional users in the Indian market. This brings the total number of people who can access WhatsApp Pay in India to 100 million users.
WhatsApp Pay available to a quarter of Indian users
The social network was initially authorized to deploy WhatsApp Pay to 40 million users on the second largest web market in the world. Today, Meta-owned messaging was able to expand its service to 100 million Indian users. WhatsApp is still far from being able to offer this service to all of its users on the market since the platform has 400 million users in India. This country is also its largest market in terms of number of users.
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A spokesperson for the National Payments Corporation of India said that “the competent authority in India has approved 60 million additional users on UPI for WhatsApp. With this approval, WhatsApp will be able to expand the service to 100 million users.. This is good news, but WhatsApp ensures that the slowness of Indian institutions would have allowed its competitors to grab market share. This is true for Google Pay and PhonePe, a company backed by Walmart. Both hold more than 70% of the market.
Instant payment: the preferred payment method in India
Instant payment is very popular in India. It has also become the method most used by Indians in recent years, partly because of the government’s decision to ban more 85% of the circulation of cash from 2016. The popularity of instant payment offered by WhatsApp Pay or Google Pay lies in their interoperability: they are compatible with all digital wallets and do not require users to pay additional fees to use them.
On this subject, Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Meta, “said that with instant payments, India has created something really special and opens up a world of opportunities for micro and small businesses which are the backbone of the Indian economy. India is the first country to do something like this”. WhatsApp has been trying since 2017 to deploy its payment service in India, but this quickly sparked a regulatory maze that lasted several years. Various agencies across the country have expressed concerns about users’ payment data. It is therefore a victory today for WhatsApp.