Mobile apps in Asia including WeChat Pay, Ali Pay and Paytm get a lot of attention with the adoption they have received, the breadth of services offered and the volume of payment transactions they support. The Economic Times reported that Facebook-owned mobile app WhatsApp is surprisingly giving the local Paytm solution a run for its money in India with 170 million more users in the country, and plans to add a P2P solution connected to India’s real-time payments platform, UPI:
Facebook-owned WhatsApp which is planning to launch its peer-to-peer, UPI-based Pay service in India later this year has nearly 400 million users in the country – a bad news for digital payments leader Paytm which last reported 230 million users.
“With a billion mobiles, lowest data costs, highest mobile data consumption, average age of 29 and almost 400 million users, the future of WhatsApp is obviously in India,” tweeted Niti Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant.
The company launched a test run of its payments service with one million users in the country last year which got stuck in the digital payments framework guidelines but now, the service is in the final stages.The country’s digital payments industry is estimated to hit $1 trillion by 2023.
At 400 million users, WhatsApp is being used by nearly every mobile phone user in the country.
Overview by Sarah Grotta, Director, Debit and Alternative Products Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group
