Amid a competitive market with Google Pay, Paytm, and PhonePe, Facebook-owned messaging platform WhatsApp, has received permission from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), to expand its pilot United Payment Interface (UPI). This would be spread to around 10 million users, as per Nandan Nilekani.
The payment feature of WhatsApp called WhatsApp Pay has been designed to run on UPI, developed by the NPCI. This allows users to pay others, or do business transactions through their bank accounts. However, all these days, WhatsApp has been running a pilot for one million users and has struggled to get a full-fledged license, since the project rolled out in 2018.
As a national publication on Friday, NPCI has allowed WhatsApp to increase it to around 10 million users. Overall in India, WhatsApp has around 400 million users.
Nandan Nilekani continued to say that six countries have been asked to study the UPI system. He even said that Google has asked the US Federal Reserve to adopt the UPI model that it is planning for FedNow, an interbank settlement system.
As of now, Facebook has said that it’s is expecting to roll out WhatsApp Pay in a number of countries, in the upcoming six months. Mark Zuckerberg said that payments and commerce are areas that would be important for platforms like Messenger and WhatsApp.