WhatsApp has finally gone live with its payments offering in India.
WhatsApp, The instant messaging application owned by Facebook with over 150 crore users worldwide, has on Wednesday announced that it is now live with its payments offering in India for its 2 crore users with four banks—State Bank of India, ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank and Axis Bank, the Facebook-owned company said in a press note on December 16. This comes after two years of waiting. WhatsApp payment service received approval from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) in November to go live on Unified Payment Interface (UPI) with over 160 supported banks.
UPI Is A Transformative Service:-
Abhijit Bose, Head of WhatsApp, India, said during the Facebook ‘Fuel for India’ virtual event, “UPI is a transformative service and we jointly have the opportunity to bring the benefits of our digital economy and financial inclusion to a large number of users who have not had full access to them before”. WhatsApp can expand its UPI user base in a graded manner starting with a maximum registered user base of 20 million.
The peer-to-peer (P2P) payment feature is available now in 10 Indian regional language versions of WhatsApp.
Bijith Bhaskar, Head – Digital Channels & Partnership, ICICI Bank said that “We introduced banking services on WhatsApp in April. Over two million users have adopted banking services on WhatsApp in this short span. Now with WhatsApp Payments, there is a unique opportunity to scale essential financial services to people all over the country with ease”.
Digital payments in India are expected to reach $94 trillion by the financial year 2025, according to RedSeer report, a Bengaluru-based research firm.
“We’re excited and privileged to partner with State Bank of India, ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank and AXIS Bank to bring simple and secure digital payments to WhatsApp users across India,” Bose said in a statement.
SBI now offers UPI services through the WhatsApp Payments, bringing the convenience of easy and instant mobile based payments.
Important Step Towards Financial Inclusion And Economic Growth:-
Partnering with WhatsApp is another important step toward achieving financial inclusion and making affordable financial services available to Indians, according to Parag Rao, Country Head-Payments Business, Consumer Finance, Digital Banking & Marketing, HDFC Bank. He added that “Such partnerships will further fuel the economic growth and development of the nation”.
WhatsApp Pay is designed with a strong set of security and privacy principles, including entering a personal UPI PIN for each payment.
It competes with Paytm, Google Pay and PhonePe as major players and many more.
The entry into the payments arena seems to be WhatsApp’s quest to be the “Superapp”.
WhatsApp shall be starting out with payments and then foray into larger financial services like digital lending and insurance.
Here is a step by step process to use Whatsapp Pay and make the payments.
To check if you have received WhatsApp Pay feature or not, click the menu on the home screen (top right, three vertical dots).
You will find Payment option.
If you have it, next step is to add your bank, verify and confirm it.
After adding the bank, you can open any chat window, click on the Clip icon, and enter the amount, UPI pin, and transfer the money.
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