WhatsApp Pay Gets Approval In India

(RTTNews) - Social media giant Facebook Inc.'s (FB) WhatsApp has received approval in India to launch its Pay feature in the country, which has a massive digital payments market.

Starting Friday, November 6, users in India will be able to send money through WhatsApp.

WhatsApp said it designed the payments feature on WhatsApp in partnership with the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) using the Unified Payment Interface (UPI), an India-first, real-time payment system that enables transactions with over 160 supported banks.

To use WhatsApp's Pay feature, an user would require a bank account and debit card. WhatsApp sends instructions to banks that initiate the transfer of money via UPI between sender and receiver bank accounts.

WhatsApp said in a blog post that it is working with five major banks in India, including ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, Axis Bank, State Bank of India and Jio Payments Bank.

India is one of the largest markets for WhatsApp with more than 400 million users.

The new feature is available on the latest version of WhatsApp on Apple's App Store and Google's Play Store.