NPCI wants it, but can WhatsApp Pay upend India's crowded UPI space?
WhatsApp Pay has been a laggard when it comes to UPI, and the reasons are not just regulatory. Now, with all caps removed by the payments regulator, it has a licence to kill. However, without a top-tier product, it might find it hard to go up against consumer habits and the PhonePe-GPay duopoly.
It took the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) two years from its trial run to let WhatsApp Pay launch UPI services in February 2020. This, too, came with a user registration cap of 20 million, with WhatsApp having to wait another two years to raise this ceiling to 100 million, and a further two more years to remove all caps altogether.
It’s 2025, and WhatsApp Pay can finally offer UPI services to its entire 500-million user base in India. The real question, though, is this: how many of these users really need WhatsApp’s UPI service or yet another UPI service?
Let’s break the numbers down.
There are an estimated 375 million monthly active UPI users in India today, a subset of the 850 million internet users in the country overall. Of these 375 million users, an overwhelming 340 million are doing it on one of the two market-leading apps—PhonePe (47.72%) and Google Pay (36.7%)—giving these a combined market share of 84.4%.
That leaves less than 16% of the playing field for the 80-odd other UPI apps in the market. If you add the third player’s UPI share (Paytm at 6.88%) to the equation, it’s even less breathing space—~9% for the rest.
Within this already small subset, newer entrants such as Sachin Bansal’s Navi and Flipkart-backed Super.money are already taking swift strides towards capturing market share. Navi, in fact, accounted for 1.21% of UPI volumes in December 2024, according to NPCI. This is notable since no other UPI app outside of the top three players has been able to achieve this in almost nine years since UPI’s inception.
Super.money, meanwhile, clocked over 101 million transactions in December, having crossed the 100-million transactions mark in just six months of operations. It accounted for 0.61% of the market—marginally ahead of even incumbents like Amazon Pay.
So, what can WhatsApp Pay do to upend this oversaturated UPI market?