WhatsApp Payment will be available for Indian consumers by next week

It was during the F8 developer conference earlier this month that Facebook has announced that it will be introducing a number of new features to WhatsApp in the coming days. This included the app's ability to make group audio and video calls and some other set of features. The WhatsApp Payments was also introduced back then. WhatsApp Payments is a UPI-based feature that is available on WhatsApp for a select number of users in India. Now, it is being reported that the company will be rolling out the service for the remaining set of users. It is expected that the Payments feature will be available for most of the users in India by next week.

However, currently, WhatsApp's partners in the money transfer are not yet ready with the feature. On the other hand, the Facebook-owned company is quite optimistic and is working on releasing the service for the users as early as possible. The company will be facing direct competition from Paytm, Google Tez, Mobikwik, and others. Keeping this in mind WhatsApp is planning on releasing the Pay feature with support for limited banks including HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, and Axis Bank. The support for State Bank of India will be added in future.

At this moment the WhatsApp Payment is available for the users on an invite-only basis, and it allows the users to create new UPI IDs from the app for money transaction. It is also being reported that WhatsApp will now allow the users those who have an account in any partner bank to use their previously created IDs. Keeping in mind the number of user base WhatsApp has in India, it would not be wrong to assume that the feature will be launched with a substantial share of the market. When we speak about the daily user base in India then the figures are 20 times more than what Paytm has in India. This will is said to act as the de-facto mode for most of the users in India.

It seems that the competition to grab the bigger share in the digital payment sector has become stiffer amongst the digital wallet companies. However, the success of the digital wallets depends widely on factors like cashbacks and others. It would be interesting to see what all new features will WhatsApp Payments will have in store for the users.