WhatsApp[1], the most popular messaging app in India, has been working on introducing person-to-person payments[2] in the country. With the feature available to a small section of WhatsApp users in India[3], the feature is expected to roll out to all of the over 200 million WhatsApp users in India soon.
While WhatsApp may seem to be focusing on peer-to-peer payments, the Facebook[4]-owned app is already home to several businesses[5] that stand to benefit via an in-built payments feature. Could WhatsApp Payments become as ubiquitous in India as WeChat[6] Pay is in China? City-based payments platform Razorpay, which processes 24 million transactions a month, is certainly betting on it.
Right now WhatsApp Payments[7] - if you’ve received the feature - lets you send and receive money from people. That’s great if you’re running your business only via WhatsApp, but not if you also allow people to buy your goods elsewhere. Enter Razorpay, which has integrated WhatsApp Payments into its platform used by digital businesses that aims to make that possible on Android devices.
Harshil Mathur, CEO of Razorpay, tells Gadgets 360 that the company sees WhatsApp Payments taking off big time in India because of the app’s large install-base, but also since it builds on top of UPI, while hiding some of its complexity.
“The good thing about UPI is that guidelines are interoperable,” says Mathur. “Only change is the way is the way WhatsApp presents it. WhatsApp doesn’t show you the VPA. Customers don’t know or recognise their VPA.”
VPA stands for virtual payment address, which is what you need to send or receive money via UPI. Apps such as WhatsApp and...