New Delhi: In a bid to give head-on competition to rivals Google Pay and homegrown payments company Paytm, WhatsApp is working to introduce cashback rewards for UPI payment service users in India. This development comes soon after Meta-owned WhatsApp won regulatory approval to more than double its payments offering to 100 million or 10 crore users in India, also its biggest market, the media has reported.
Earlier this month, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) gave its go-ahead to an additional 60 million users on unified payments interface (UPI) for WhatsApp, thus, increasing its payments offering to 100 million users on the platform.
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WhatsApp will within weeks roll out cashback rewards to lure more Indians to its peer-to-peer payments service and is testing similar incentives for merchant payments, as the company seeks to compete with rivals including Google, said a report by news agency Reuters citing sources.
The messaging platform will offer cashback worth up to Rs 33 if users make payments through WhatsApp. It should be noted that cashback was very popular on digital payment providers in India including Google Pay. The amount, even though small, would be compelling enough for users to switch to payments on WhatsApp, according to Neil Shah, vice president of research at Counterpoint Research, the report added.
Earlier in November 2021, the NPCI approved increasing the user cap for WhatsApp's payment service from 20 million to 40 million users. The NPCI has been giving approval to WhatsApp in a phased manner so that the competition in the digital payment space which has names like Google Pay, PhonePe and Paytm is not stifled.
WhatsApp introduced its ambitious peer-to-peer (P2P) digital payments pilot project in India in 2018 with nearly 10 lakh users. According to the NPCI, UPI had processed 5.04 billion transactions till March 29, amounting to Rs 8.88 trillion, according to a report by news agency IANS.