The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has green lit WhatsApp Pay's launch in India through a graded manner, with user registration restricted to 20 million at present, NPCI said in a press release on Thursday. WhatsApp Pay is a UPI-based payments service by the end-to-end encrypted platform in India. The service has been in a beta-testing phase for two years now, restricted to only 1 million users, as regulators were awaiting the company's compliance with data localisation norms introduced by the Reserve Bank of India in April 2018. In a blog post on Friday, WhatsApp said that the UPI payment service on the messaging app is supported by ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, Axis Bank, the State Bank of India and Jio Payments Bank. "In the long run, we believe the combination of WhatsApp and UPI’s unique architecture can help local organizations address some of the key challenges of our time, including increasing rural participation in the digital economy and delivering financial services to those who have never had access before," the company said. WhatsApp's dominance in India India is WhatsApp's largest market with over 400 million users and 15 million small businesses using the messaging platform to connect with their customers. One of the reasons why its launch has been restricted by the NPCI to 20 million users is the potential for dominance the platform can have in UPI ecosystem. While UPI is dominated by two players — Google Pay and PhonePe — that have market share close to…
