New Delhi: The National Payments Corporation of India has allowed Facebook Inc. to start operating its WhatsApp payments service through the multibank Unified Payments Interface (UPI) in the country.
In more good news for users, no fee will be charged when sending money via WhatsApp.
“Now you can send money to your friends and family through WhatsApp as easily as sending a message. There’s no fee, and it’s supported by more than 140 banks. And because it’s WhatsApp, it’s secure and private too,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a video statement after the UPI approval for the service on Thursday, Hindustan Times reported.
Zuckerberg further said that the payments will be available in 10 Indian regional language versions of WhatsApp. “All you need is a debit card with a bank that supports UPI and you can set it up straight away. You can find it in the latest version of WhatsApp,” he said.
“We’ve been working on this with the National Payments Corporation of India, which oversees everything to make sure it’s secure and reliable. And we’ve built it using India’s Unified Payments Interface, which makes it easy for anyone to instantly accept payments across different apps and for companies to provide people with great services,” he added.
India’s payments market is crowded with domestic pioneer Paytm, Alphabet Inc.’s Google Pay, Walmart Inc.’s PhonePe, Amazon.com Inc.’s Amazon Pay and dozens of other start-ups.
Yet, given its enormous user base of more than 400 million, WhatsApp has the potential to compete with the leaders and reshape digital payments in India — a market slated to grow to $1 trillion by 2023.
