Banking Services to Over 2 Million ICICI Bank Customers now available on Whatsapp!

Whatsapp seems to be rolling out new features by each passing day. Not too long was the carts feature added to Whatsapp to help small businesses. It recently announced that it will offer banking services to customers of commercial banks in India.

ICICI Bank announced at the Facebook ‘Fuel for India’ virtual event on Wednesday that about 2 million customers have adopted banking services on Whatsapp. ICICI is only one among five other banking partners that have opted in to the payment feature of Whatsapp. The feature is available as of now up to 20 million users in the country which is only about 5 percent of the app’s userbase in India of 400 million.

The feature was launched first is April and grew tremendously within the course of 4 months. It hit the one million mark in July. The services included enabling customers to check their account balance, view their last three transactions, and find their nearest ATM and bank branch through the instant messaging app.

The list of banking partners for payments on WhatsApp includes State Bank of India and Jio Payments Bank — alongside ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, and Axis Bank.

“The initiative helped our customers bank conveniently and remotely without visiting the branch during the pandemic,” said Bijith Bhaskar, Head – Digital Channels and Partnership, ICICI Bank, in a statement.

ICICI Bank has also enabled payments on WhatsApp, a service that was appreciated by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) last month and is currently live for 20 million users.

“As a digital ally, WhatsApp has the potential to support our customers in a seamless manner through servicing, onboarding and managing grievances, all, on the same platform,” said Sanjeev Moghe, EVP and Head – Cards and Payments, Axis Bank.

Although the NPCI announced that the feature will be made available in a “graded manner” in India, Whatsapp announced on Wednesday that the feature was already live in the country.