Bengaluru: WhatsApp recently started its cashback campaign for existing and new users with an aim to boost its digital payment platform WhatsApp Pay. Now, it looks like this has made a significant impact on the app. According to reports, WhatsApp pay has reported a significant surge in daily transaction numbers that has increased to 2-3 million payments per day up from a few hundred thousand till recently.
WhatsApp Pay started giving cashbacks to users actively over the past couple of weeks and this has caused the number of transactions to increase by a noticeable amount. WhatsApp recently offered consumers a single-day promotion of up to Rs 105 cashback in three tranches for sending Re 1 or more to different contacts.
Though WhatsApp has gained a surge in transaction numbers but, the question is will it hold these numbers if there is no cashback offer or not. Currently, Google Pay, Paytm and PhonePe are the most popular online payment platforms. According to EconomicsTime, PhonePe and Google Pay hold around 47% and 34% market share, respectively, as of April this year. While WhatsApp Pay had a share of only 0.04%. In the recent days of their launch, Google Pay and PhonePe also offered incentives to attract users and get them to transact more through their platforms.
WhatsApp Pay is also reportedly focusing on merchant payments as that could unlock higher volume of transactions from existing and new users of the platform. It has started attracting various merchants for UPI-based payments.
However, its user base has not crossed the 40 million, which is the earlier allotted user limit for the app, said sources.
Earleir, WhatsApp Pay had sought UPI manager National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) nod to take its payments service to all its user in one go without any further cap. If WhatsApp manages to bring all its users to WhatsApp Pay then it will be a potential competitor to Walmart and Flipkart-owned PhonePe and Google Pay. WhatsApp currently has over 400 million monthly active users in the country.
WhatsApp’s growth is also seen critical for UPI as the regulator wants a diverse set of UPI apps on the network for consumers instead of increased on two platforms.
NPCI may extend the January 2023 deadline for its contentious mandate requiring payment apps to hold no more than 30% market share.
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Ms Kalinga