WhatsApp is reported to be secretly working on a mobile payment system. The Facebook-owned Messaging App is gearing to launch a peer-to-peer payments system that will be powered by government’s aspirational Unified Payments Interface (UPI), according to a report by The Ken.
The report further highlights that the brand is also looking to hire people who have expertise in UPI, Aadhaar and Bharat Interface for Money (BHIM), the payments app launched by the government in association with major banks. Recently, WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton had said that the company may enter digital payments and that it is in ‘early stages’ of investigating the segment.
If this report is believed to be true then WhatsApp will surely be a great beneficiary as it has a user base of close to 200 million and it would be interesting to see whether the company will be able to turn its user base into faithful customers or not.
Meanwhile, WhatsApp’s text status feature which was removed last month following a Snapchat-like update has now made a return in the latest update. The old status feature is available for the stable version 2.17.107 of the app while the feature has already made a comeback in beta version 2.17.95.