WhatsApp new payments function via messaging App in India

WhatsApp has streamlined its new payments function via the messaging app service to become the quickest way to take orders from small business customers and is the easiest way to take their payments in India.

Since May 2018, over 1 million Indians have been testing a new payments function in the messaging app, which is owned by Facebook.

 

WhatsApp Pay, which is facilitated by the Indian Government’s secure UPI payments system, transfers funds directly between users’ bank accounts in real time without any intermediary banking system.

 

For WhatsApp and Facebook, the payments trails in India is the first step towards tapping hugely valuable new channel of data, how people are spending their money.

Since WhatsApp began testing its payments feature in February 18, it has processed over one million transactions a month, according to the National Payments Corporation of India, the umbrella organisation for payments and settlements companies. But when it tried to extend the service nationwide, it has run into headwinds with regulators demanding its payment data be processed in India, rather than Facebook’s servers in California.

There were several meetings with Chris Daniels, WhatsApp chief executive, and India’s central bank Governor.

 

India is WhatsApp’s biggest market by far, with 210 million monthly users and the company has hired Abhijit Bose, from Ezetap , a Bangalore based payments platform, as its new country chief.

 

During the deadlock Google has launched its own payments service, as WhatsApp has floated the idea of launching WhatsApp payments in Latin America, particularly in Brazil, the App’s second largest market.

 

The economic opportunity for mobile payments in India is huge, there are more than 1bn mobile phone users and then digital payments market, led by the mobile will grow to $12tn by 2023, according to Credit Sussie.

UPI created by National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), a joint venture by Indian banks as the technology drastically lowered the barriers to entry for payments app developers, by removing the need for consumers to keep money in a separate virtual wallet, as with Paytm’s main service or with Alipay and Wechat Pay in China.

Google also jumped on the UPI platform, launching its payments app Tez in September 2017 with 16m users .