In a release issued on Tuesday, NPCI said that the 100-million-users cap on WhatsApp Pay has been removed. This means that India’s most widely used messaging platform can now onboard its more-than-500 million users onto UPI.
When WhatsApp Pay was launched in 2020, the NPCI had imposed a cap of one million users on the messaging application. The thought process behind the cap was to scale up the popular service slowly so as to not create any additional stress on the baking ecosystem. The cap was further relaxed to 100 million in 2022 and has been removed altogether now.
While Facebook-owned messaging application is one of the largest and the most widely used messaging applications in the country, it has a very negligible share of UPI payments. In November, WhatsApp Pay processed only 51 million UPI transactions, compared to more than 12 billion transactions processed by Google Pay and PhonePe together.
In November 2023, WhatsApp Pay had processed around 22 million transactions.
Industry insiders pointed out that NPCI is still betting big on someone like WhatsApp Pay to start getting adopted in the mainstream. ET had written in April that NPCI has been nudging new third-party applications who are offering UPI-based payments, to grow their user base through incentives. Meetings were held with smaller UPI players to find out ways in which more apps could be popularised on UPI. As of now, none of those steps have shown the desired results.
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Players like Navi and Cred have shown some growth in UPI payments over the last few months, but in terms of market share they have just around 1%.
