WhatsApp payment service on Friday said it is rolling out its payments services in India and has secured necessary approval from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) to go live on Unified Payment Interface (UPI) with over 160 supported banks.

WhatsApp can expand its UPI user base in a graded manner starting with a maximum registered user base of 20 million in UPI, NPCI said.

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Payments is available now in 10 Indian regional language versions of WhatsApp.

In 2018, the Facebook-owned company had started testing its UPI-based payments service in India, which allows users to utilise the messaging platform to send and receive money. The testing was limited to about a million users as it waited for regulatory approvals to come in.

Now over 400 million WhatsApp users in India can soon securely send money to friends and family, and payments feature is now available for iPhone and Android users who are on the latest version of the app.

On Thursday, NPCI – which runs the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) used for real-time payments between peers or at merchants’ end while making purchases – allowed WhatsApp to start its payments service in the country in a “graded” manner, starting with a maximum registered user base of 20 million in UPI.

“I am excited today that WhatsApp has been approved to launch payments across India. We’ve been working on this with the National Payments Corporation of India, who oversee everything to make sure it’s secure and reliable,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement on Friday.

“And we’ve built it using India’s Unified Payments Interface, which makes it easy for anyone to instantly accept payments across different apps — and for companies to provide people with great services”.

In June this year, WhatsApp had launched ‘WhatsApp Pay’ in Brazil – making it the first country where the service was widely rolled out.

In India, WhatsApp – which counts India as its biggest market with over 400 million users – will compete with players like Paytm, Google Pay, Walmart-owned PhonePe and Amazon Pay.

WhatsApp said it is working with five banks in India – ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, Axis Bank, the State Bank of India, and Jio Payments Bank – and people can send money on WhatsApp to anyone using a UPI supported app.

“In the long run, we believe the combination of WhatsApp and UPI’s unique architecture can help local organisations address some of the key challenges of our time, including increasing rural participation in the digital economy and delivering financial services to those who have never had access before,” it added.

WhatsApp noted that its payments service is designed with a strong set of security and privacy principles, including entering a personal UPI PIN for each payment.