WhatsApp got NPCI approval to increase user cap for its payment service to 40 million
The online social networking platform, Whatsapp has achieved the regulatory approval for increasing the user cap for its payment service from the 20 million to 40 million. It will soar the competition in the digital payments space in India.
The director of Payments of WhatsApp India, Manesh Mahatme claimed that they are on their way to scale up their services in phases and the focus will be on the marketing initiatives to aware users about the new payment feature.
Meta-owned WhatsApp has more than 400 million users in India and providing the payment feature in one go to all may lead to extremely high transactions volume on NPCI platforms.
The National Payments Corporation of India approved WhatsApp proposal to start Payments services in November 2020 with a cap of 20 million users and complying Indian regulations.
Accordingto reports, “They were pushing for the cap to be lifted altogether but NPCI didn’t want to do that so they have increased it to 40 million. Their numbers have gone up significantly and is very close to breaching the 20 million limit.”
WhatsApp has also recently added a rupee icon in the chat composer, between the attachment and camera icons to make its payment service more visible to the users. It also allowed the camera icon to scan QR codes to make payments.
The number of transactions on the app have almost doubled to 1 million from August to September and then in October it reached to more than 2.6 million. The share of WhatsApp in India’s monthly payments is at a meagre rate of 0.06 percent while its strong competitors PhonePe and Google Pay contributes for about 47 percent and 34 percent of payments respectively.
Online transactions, lending and e-wallet services or on the whole we can use the word Cashless Economy is making its place in India and the day is not far when most of India’s population will rely on online payments.
