WhatsApp Pay was officially announced for India on November 2020. During the month, the payment service platform registered 20 million financial transactions passed through it. When it was initially announced, the platform was restricted only to be rolled out to 1 million users in the country. But later the maximum user limit was extended to 20 million users. However, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) platform hasn’t got a flying start during its first month of operation. WhatsApp Pay clocked less than 1% of the total UPI transactions that took place in the month — more details ahead.
WhatsApp Pay Yet to Hit its Maximum Users Limit
Registering less than 1% of the total UPI transactions in the month of November 2020, it is indeed a slow start for WhatsApp Pay. As per a report shared by the ET Telecom, WhatsApp Pay saw over 20 million transactions last month.
To get a perspective of how small this number is, the overall market saw a total of 2.2 billion UPI transactions in November 2020. Compared to October’s 2.1 billion total transactions, it is a growth of 7% for total UPI transactions in the country.
A thing worth noting here is that WhatsApp Pay currently allows only peer-to-peer payments. The peer-to-merchant payments haven’t been allowed until now. WhatsApp has over 400 million monthly active users in the country, so there is no denying that this number will increase as time passes by.
WhatsApp Pay hasn’t even been able to successfully hit the maximum users limit in India until now. But that is because the feature is still in the rollout phase in India.
Google Pay and PhonePe are ruling the markets when it comes to UPI transactions. These two platforms are part of over 80% of the total transactions that take place in the country. Behind these two are Paytm and Amazon Pay.
Overall, India is said to have approximately 100-120 million active UPI users. National Payments Corporation of India (NCPI) has said that none of the UPI platforms can carry out more than 30% of the total transactions from January 2021.
