WhatsApp’s payments service gets NPCI nod

NEW DELHI:  The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) on Thursday finally allowed Facebook-owned messaging platform WhatsApp to roll out its payments service in the country in a “graded” manner. 

The announcement by NPCI came just minutes after the organisation made a crucial change to its regulations concerning the use of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI). The change puts a limit on single third parties such as WhatsApp or its rivals Google Pay and Walmart’s PhonePe where they can only handle 30 per cent of overall UPI transaction volumes. 

The NPCI runs the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) used for real-time payments between peers or at merchants’ end while making purchases. The UPI channel has rapidly grown to become India’s most favoured mode of digital transactions since its launch in terms of volumes. 

Placing a cap on how much transaction volumes such companies can use will help in de-risking the entire set-up, according to the NPCI. The payments agency added that such a measure was an essential one since UPI, which surpassed two billion transactions a month in October, continues to grow.

The industry expects that allowing WhatsApp into the payments space may drive up volumes in the sector. In China, for instance, Wechat alone has over 1 billion active users for its payment services. WhatsApp has 400 million users in India currently.