WhatsApp is adding support for paying bills in India
India is WhatsApp's biggest market by far, with over 500 million users. So it should come as no surprise that WhatsApp wants to make itself ever more useful for Indians. The next feature it's working on right now is letting you pay your bills directly in WhatsApp, no other service required.
This has been discovered through an APK teardown of WhatsApp's latest beta version for Android. The functionality will work with electricity bills, mobile prepaid recharges, LPG gas payments, water bills, landline postpaid bills, and rent payments - or at least, those are the categories listed inside the hidden code as of now. Of course, the list may grow - either between now and the feature's initial release, or soon thereafter.
Currently, WhatsApp lets Indians send money to contacts and make payments to businesses via UPI. The bill payment system would come as an expansion of that. It's unclear when it will launch, but if nothing goes wrong, expect to see it within the next few months.
About a month ago, India's National Payments Corporation lifted the cap on WhatsApp Pay's user onboarding, meaning WhatsApp can now offer financial services to all of its 500+ million users in India. The bill payments feature will likely be a part of a coming push to get them to use WhatsApp Pay.