National Payments Corporation of India gave permission to Whatsapp to release the payments feature in India. Now you can transfer money directly through your Whatsapp account to another. NPCI has said that there will be a 30 percent cap on all payments implemented on total payment volumes that take place through all third party payments app from 1 January 2021.
Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is a single platform that merges various banking services and features under one umbrella and turns smart phones into a virtual debit card, allowing real-time bank-to-bank payments to be made using a mobile number or virtual payment address.
This process was initiated in February 2018 when WhatsApp had started the beta testing of its UPI-based payment service that allows users to make transactions via WhatsApp.
Payment service will only be rolled out to 20 million WhatsApp users. At present , the messaging app has over 400 million users in India. The guidelines stipulate any entity not exceeding 30% of the total transaction volume to be in compliance. However, entities exceeding the said market share have been given time till 2023 to comply. The cap will be calculated on the basis of total volume of transactions processed in UPI during the preceding three months on a rolling basis. The cap was introduced to keep in check on the risks involved in UPI.
Making payments gets easier as to make payments using WhatsApp a user just needs to have a bank account and a debit card. They would also require an active 4-digit UPI pin to make transactions.The Facebook-owned messaging app would not hold WhatsApp liable for any payment mishaps. Banks’ are concerns about the sudden rise in transaction volumes and the increased load on their systems after the introduction of WhatsApp UPI.
