Whatsapp Pay - UPI based Payment from Whatsapp - Beta app and reason for delay

     Whatsapp pay is one of the long due pending UPI based payment option like Paytm, Phonepe and other home grown players in digital payments market. Initially Whatsapp pay was first appeared for its beta testing on first quater of 2018 after getting an approval from National Payments Corporation of India(NPCL) which is necessary for implementing the UPI based payment system in India. 

    But Whatsapp pay was not rolled out to everyone even though they got approval from NPCL, because the data storage guidelines from RBI to store all the payment related data inside Indian territories. Initially Whatsapp was planed to use servers outside of India to store user data which was against the RBI guidelines. That's the reason, Whatsapp pay was not rolled out to public till date.

    Now Whatsapp was accepted to store all the user and payment data inside India under the storage guidelines of RBI. On May 2020, Whatsapp submitted an audit report to NPCL to validate its data compliance and NPCL was convinced about the data compliance policy. 

    So we can expect Whatsapp to start rolling out this UPI based payment option in a phased manner. As of now, Whatsapp Pay was rolled out only some people as of now. But we can download  Whatsapp Beta apk from the trusted source to try this feature before stable release. 

    Setting up the payment options through the Whatsapp is similar to the other UPI based payment apps available in the market.

Whatsapp Pay Interface:

    Sending money through Whatsapp pay is like sending a message to a person. To send a payment for a particular person that you want, you need to follow the below steps to add bank account for the first time to start transfer the payment.

• Open the chat of a person that you want to transfer the money.
• Then on the bottom right side behind the send icon, there is an attachment icon. Press that icon and you will see the below options.

• Then you will see the option to select the bank that you're having an account with.

• On the next screen, there is an option to confirm the mobile number via SMS and it will fetch the account linked to the mobile number that you entered.

• Mobile number used in Whatsapp should be same as the mobile number linked to the bank account that you gonna add for payment.
• Also the recipent should also be configured the above steps to start receiving the payment.