Whatsapp payments which was launched in India last month, has started off slowly with only 310,000 unified payments interface (UPI) transactions in November, according to data from the National Payments Corpn. of India (NPCI).One reason for the lukewarm response to Whatsapp Pay was its limited availability, with many of the 400 million active users in India not getting the feature at the same time. However, experts said with incentives, such as cashbacks and more merchant-centric features, the Facebook-owned company can make headway in a market that is largely dominated by pure payment apps such as PhonePe, Paytm and Google Pay.
NPCI has put a 30% cap on UPI transactions to reduce the monopoly of Google Pay and PhonePe, which in November recorded 960 million and 868 million transactions, respectively. However, experts believe WhatsApp still has a long way to go.“Many users still do not know that WhatsApp has payments capability. As users start interacting with businesses and when businesses start sending payment request via UPI, gradually we will see transactions grow on WhatsApp too,” said Arnav Gupta, analyst, Forrester Research.
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