WhatsApp UPI’s struggle continues after a temporary spike

The strategy of retaining customers for its payments feature doesn’t seem to be going well for WhatsApp as the Meta-owned company hasn’t managed to maintain the spike in the number of transactions in July when compared to the previous month.

In June, WhatsApp launched a cashback scheme for users who could avail the offer for the next three payments via UPI to get a total of Rs 105 cashback. However, the company pulled back the offer later and saw a sharp decline in the transaction volume from 23.04 million in June to 6.18 million in July, as per NPCI’s data. The trend further continued as WhatsApp registered 6.72 million transactions in August.

While the transaction volume for WhatsApp UPI declined for consecutive months, the platform saw a surge in its value of transactions from Rs 429 crore in June to Rs 502 crore in July and Rs 567 crore in August.

The transaction volume and value trend for WhatsApp in 2022 can be seen in the graph below:

Overall, UPI registered 6.57 billion transactions worth Rs 10.72 lakh crore (Rs 10.72 trillion) in August. In terms of volume wise market share, PhonePe controls 47.8% in the UPI ecosystem followed by Google Pay and Paytm with 33.6% and 13.2% share respectively. Government-promoted BHIM has 0.38% share while WhatsApp has a mere 0.1%. PhonePe, Google Pay and Paytm also lead the pack when it comes to value wise market share in UPI.

Still, there is a positive sign for WhatsApp which used to register around 1 million transactions in 2020 and 2 million in 2021.

Going forward, the market share of the top three players may be capped at 30% to abide by the rules of NPCI. The deadline set by NPCI for adhering to the market cap is January 2023. As per an ET report, the deadline may get extended.