Launch of WhatsApp payments expected to boost growing digital payments in India

The NPCI has placed an initial limit on the number of users WhatsApp can expand its service to at 20 million. - AFP

NEW DELHI (The Straits Times/ANN): Digital payments in India registered significant growth in recent months amid the Covid-19 pandemic, a trend likely to be further reinforced with the launch of a payment facility on WhatsApp earlier this month.

The number of Unified Payments Interface (UPI)-based payments hit a new milestone in India with more than two billion transactions in October, government data showed. The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) valued the transactions at 3.86 trillion rupees (S$69.8 billion).