WhatsApp has announced that its digital payment arm WhatsApp Pay may be able to roll out its services in India in a phased manner.

WhatsApp is a messaging platform bought by Facebook a few years ago and has become India’s most preferred service. This is expected to disrupt the country’s digital payments sector, currently dominated by Alphabet’s mobile payments system – Google Pay.

The Facebook-owned messaging service got approval from the National Payments Corporation of India, an umbrella body for operating retail payments and settlements.

The payments corporation gave approval after the Reserve Bank of India gave it a green light. In October 2019, a third-party security audit, endorsed by the central bank, was performed to check WhatsApp Pay for security compliance.

WhatsApp has assured both organizations that it will comply with data localization norms. The government wants digital payments companies to store all critical data within India. WhatsApp initially resisted the government’s stand on data localization and that was a key reason behind the delay in the launch of its payment service.

It will also run on Unified Payments Interface platform, a state-run financial payments platform developed by the National Payments Corporation of India.

WhatsApp Pay rollout will take place in phases, as the parent organization needs time to localize financial transaction data and also help banks to scale up their systems as users start transacting.

In the first phase, WhatsApp Pay will cater to 10 million users in India. Payments through WhatsApp were introduced to a million users as a part of trial run in February 2018 in a partnership with ICICI Bank.