In November last year, WhatsApp was given permission to increase its user cap from 20 million to 40 million in India. A few months later, the National Payments Corporation of India has now granted the popular Meta-owned messaging platform to better increase the reach of its payments service to an additional 60 million users, granting it the ability to add a total of 100 million WhatsApp Pay users in India.
WhatsApp Pay can now have a userbase of 100 million in India, which will be five times more than what was the case at the time of its official launch in 2020. This decision is part of the plan, which required WhatsApp to roll out its payments service in India in a phased manner to ensure things happen smoothly.
This comes at a time when the NPCI has made it necessary that no player in the UPI sector should have more than a 30% share of the total UPI transactions during a quarter. While this can prove helpful for WhatsApp Pay, it remains to be seen how this change will impact all the UPI players in the market.
