WhatsApp Payment Service To Soon Cater Indian Consumers

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oi-Sharmishte Datti

| Published: Tuesday, October 15, 2019, 17:16 [IST]

WhatsApp payment service will soon be launched in India says National Payments Corporation of India. According to reports, WhatsApp will be compliant with the data localization norms in the coming months.

WhatsApp Payments Service

WhatsApp has been testing its payment service in the country for a year now. There are nearly 300 million digital payment users and the WhatsApp payments feature will certainly affect stakeholders. Many hold the opinion that WhatsApp payments service will play a vital role in achieving a cashless payments economy.

The WhatsApp payments service will still require at least two years reducing the dominance of hard-cash flow in the Indian economy. The user-base of the digital payment platform must increase to at least 300 million users to have any visible impact, notes NPCI’s chief executive Dilip Asbe in an interview with PTI. He also added that other intermediaries are under development. “One is Google, second is WhatsApp. We believe WhatsApp will be fully compliant in the next two months’ time,” Asbe said.

The WhatsApp beta testing has roughly a million users now. But to meet RBI’s data localization norm, it requires foreign companies to store transaction and user data within the country and delete the same from foreign servers within 24 hours. Asbe explains that a third-party audit firm, hired by RBI, is working on WhatsApp’s compliance.

Digital Payments In India

The NPCI chief noted that other players in the digital payments platform like Xiaomi, Amazon Pay, and Truecaller have still not launched their payments service because of the same data localization rules. According to a Niti Aayog survey, most of the financial transactions take place under Rs. 100. This is where the RBI is striving to boost the digital payments through the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) in India.

There are only five percent of digital payment users who use scan-based features for payments. In stark comparison, China has 600 million users every day who use scan-based payment digital payments. Asbe hopes that platforms like WhatsApp with its massive user-base will aid in the process.

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