NPCI allows WhatsApp Pay to go live in India

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has given a nod to WhatsApp’s payment platform, that is, WhatsApp Pay, to go live in India via the Unified Payments Interface (UPI).

The organisation said that WhatsApp can expand its payments userbase in India in a graded manner. In the first phone, WhatsApp Pay can be expanded to a user base of 20 million users. The company has a user base of 400 million in India.

“National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has given approval for WhatsApp to ‘Go Live’ on UPI in the multi-bank model. WhatsApp can expand its UPI user base in a graded manner starting with a maximum registered user base of twenty (20) million in UPI,” NPCI wrote in a statement.

With this WhatsApp Pay joins the league of other payment platforms including Google Pay, Paytm, PhonePe and Amazon Pay that are available in India in addition to the payment platforms by individual banks in the country.

The development comes shortly after NPCI issued a cap of 30% on the total volume of transactions processed in UPI on all third-party app providers. “This will be with effect from January 1, 2021. It will help to address the risks and protect the UPI ecosystem as it further scales up,” the organisation added.

WhatsApp launched its payments platform to a select group of users back in February 2018. Since then it has partnered with a bunch of banks including ICICI Bank and HDFC Bank. It has also tried to address the regulatory concerned, which entailed the company setting its data centres in India amid other things. 

The company got a clean chit by RBI back in June wherein the central bank stated that it was satisfied with WhatsApp’s compliance with data storage rules and can bring Unified Payments Interface (UPI) to everyone.