Exclusive: Tencent is launching UPI-powered payments app WeChat Pay in India
Ever since its launch in April 2016, Unified Payment Interface (UPI) has been growing quickly and reached a milestone of Rs 1 trillion worth monthly transactions in December 2018. Sensing the opportunity in digital payments space, several global behemoths including Google, Amazon, WhatsApp and Xiaomi jumped to UPI bandwagon.
Following the footprints of above four global behemoths, Tencent-owned WeChat is also launching a UPI-enabled separate app for payments.
“Senior officials of Tencent comprising of Chinese as well as Indians met National Payment Corporation of India (NPCI) executives three weeks ago for obtaining a licence for full-fledged payments app,” said two sources inside NPCI on condition of anonymity.
Entrackr has reached out to NPCI. We’ll update the post as the response comes in.
Like Google Pay, it would operate only under UPI ecosystem. Sources emphasised that the app is likely to be named as it’s in China – WeChat Pay. “Tencent already had partnered with three banks – Axis Bank, HDFC and ICICI. It wants to have its own UPI handle (@wechat),” outlined sources.
The app would be launched by the end of May-June. “The company is registering an Indian entity for WeChat Pay,” outlined one of the internal sources at Tencent India.All three of the highlighted banks are among the top ten banks in India although their combined assets are still lower than State Bank of India. Still, a running start on owning the market.
Entrackr has independently verified this with sources at Tencent’s Indian unit. However, they requested anonymity as they aren’t authorised to speak to media.
In China, Tencent’s WeChat Pay is the second most popular payments app after Alipay....MORE
