The company has been working on support for a payments feature for some time, which would take advantage of UPI (Unified Payments Interface) and include support by a number of Indian banks, including State Bank of India, ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, and Axis Bank.
Beta testers have now found that this functionality is live, with a large list of supported banks displayed in the WhatsApp user interface.
WhatsApp has begun testing a new payments feature in India that will allow people to send money to other.
WhatsApp users, excluding merchant accounts. The feature is currently in beta, according to sources familiar with the company’s plans, but hasn’t been publicly announced because it’s not widely available at this time.
According to post viaTwitter and elsewhere, including this post from the blog iPhoneHacks, those who have gained access to the new functionality will see a payments feature appear in their WhatsApp Settings menu.
https://t.co/srAKgNdLzlHowever, WhatsApp’s support for payments is highly anticipated because of the app’s huge popularity among Indian users.
India is WhatsApp’s largest market with over 200 million users active daily users. In fact, it’s so heavily used in that country that it’s even led to issues as Indians grapple with the social norms involving daily messaging ranging from phones’ storage filling up with “good morning” messages, to drama over exiting family group chats.
