WhatsApp has seen a surge in UPI payments through its app registering almost 2-3 million payments every day. According to a report by Economic Times, users who have registered to WhatsApp Pay have increased after the company announced its cashback offers. To onboard more users for the service, WhatsApp was offering cashback of up to Rs 105. The cashback amount is provided on completing three transactions in the app.
The report states that the company is expected to keep the traffic of payments up by providing more cashback offers to customers. They are working on onboarding many of the businesses in the country to the platform as well. WhatsApp may also provide more incentives for businesses to integrate payments through their respective WhatsApp Business accounts.
WhatsApp Pay’s journey in India was slow initially. While the feature was available on the app, many users were sceptical to use the service amid privacy and security concerns at the time. The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) had also recently increased the limit for the number of users who can make transactions through WhatsApp Pay to 100 million.
As per the market share in April of this year, it looks like PhonePe and Google Pay still hold the majority of transaction traffic in the country. They account for 47% and 34% respectively, while WhatsApp was a 0.04% market share. It will be interesting to see what the new figures are now that there are new developments.
WhatsApp Pay might get lucky
The cashback offers will be a boost for WhatsApp Pay. For end users like us, the benefit may not be there in the long run. We’ve seen Google Pay and other apps provide large cashback amounts, which slowly become smaller denominations. Users have already started taking advantage of the initial cashback campaign from WhatsApp by making Re 1 payment too. So, while WhatsApp is happy about the increase in traffic, the excitement could be short-lived.
But not to sound all doom and gloom, WhatsApp may actually get lucky if the NPCI enforces its rules on market domination. The government body has strict guidelines that no one app should be having more than a 30% market share of total transactions to avoid monopoly. The apps could be penalised with a restriction on the number of users that can conduct transactions on their apps.
