WhatsApp introduced its Unified Payments Interface (UPI)-based money transferring platform - WhatsApp Payments - with a limited user base of about 1 million users last February. Since then technical and regulatory hurdles have kept the Facebook-owned social messaging app from expanding the service in India. However, things have started clearing out and now a new report suggests that the company could fully launch WhatsApp Payments in India around September this year.
Two bankers familiar with the matter told The Economic Times that it may take the social messaging app up to five months to localise its payments-related information in India and be available to all its users across the country.
"WhatsApp may have started working on creating provisions to store payments data within the country, but to finish the third-party audit and to comply with all technical requirements, it will easily take time till August or September," one of the bankers said in a statement to the publication.
As of now, WhatsApp offers WhatsApp payments to a limited number of users in India in partnership with several banks including the ICICI Bank, Axis Bank, HDFC Bank, and the State Bank o India. But this is likely to change in the coming months.
Earlier this month, reports suggests that the company had agreed to comply with the norms prescribed by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) regarding the storage of payments related data within the country. "We plan to comply with RBI guidelines. Only some engineering work is left," a senior Facebook executive had said in a statement to the ET.
Apart from storing its payments data on servers within the country, WhatsApp (and others in the digital payments space) also needs to get a third-party done by CERT IN-empanelled auditors. Now a new report by the publication suggests that the company has already started working with the third-party auditors for localisation of its payments related data.
This means that if all goes well, WhatsApp users in India will soon be able to use the platform not just to communicate with their family and friends but they would also be able to send and receive money using the app
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