WhatsApp Pay has sharply expanded its presence in India’s UPI market, processing 167.89 million transactions worth ₹12,957.07 crore in July 2026. Its transaction volume was more than twice the 74.6 million transactions recorded in the same month last year. The Meta-owned messaging platform’s payments service is now the eighth-largest UPI app in India by transaction volume. The sharp rise in payments activity comes around 19 months after the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) removed restrictions on WhatsApp Pay’s user onboarding in December 2024.
The move allowed the platform to expand its UPI user base without the earlier caps.
NPCI had approved WhatsApp Pay to go live on UPI in November 2020 under the multi-bank model, initially allowing it to onboard up to 20 million users. The limit was increased to 40 million in 2021 and then to 100 million in 2022. In 2024, NPCI removed the restrictions on the number of users WhatsApp Pay could onboard.
Despite its rapid growth, WhatsApp Pay remains well behind the three biggest UPI platforms. In July 2026, PhonePe processed 10.85 billion transactions, followed by Google Pay with 7.64 billion and Paytm with 1.90 billion transactions.
At the time of the launch, WhatsApp partnered with ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, Axis Bank, State Bank of India and Jio Payments Bank. The payments feature was designed to let users send and receive money within WhatsApp, without having to use a separate payments app.
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