If a new report is to be believed, WhatsApp may add digital payments functionality to its app for users in India as early as next month. It has reportedly been working on integrating the country’s Unified Payment Interface, a government-backed platform that enables developers to quickly integrated digital payments for India into apps.
WhatsApp received approval from the country’s government to integrate with UPI back in July last year. Google’s Tez app for India already uses this digital payments platform to enable users to pay their bills.
Given WhatsApp’s immense popularity in the Indian market, its integration with UPI is going to bring a big segment of the population into the digital payments ecosystem.
WhatsApp is said to be at various stages of integrating the UPI platform with the State Bank of India, ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, and Axis Bank.
“The platform is already in beta stage (testing) with one of its partner banks. We expect the product to go live for consumers by the end of February, depending on how the trials work out,” a source quoted in the report claims.
The final step before this functionality goes live will be to test the UPI integration in WhatsApp with a select group of users to ensure that all of the safety checks and balances are working as they should have and that the functionality is working as it’s supposed to.
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