Whether you are sending money to your friends and family, or paying for your monthly purchases at the departmental store, you would agree that Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has made life that much simple when it comes to making digital payments.
Now, in a bid to make UPI even more widespread, WhatsApp is allowing users to send money as swiftly as sending an emoji.
To initiate the process, you would first need to tap on the rupee icon on the recipient’s window or scan the relevant QR code.
Here a detailed four-step guide on making UPI payments using WhatsApp.
Step 1: First, your UPI bank account’s primary phone number must match with that of your WhatsApp account. After this, you will need to open the WhatsApp chat window of the person you want to send your money to, and tap on the payments tab. Then you would need to enter the amount you wish to send in rupees. Then, you would need to tap on ‘get started.’ You need to accept the terms and privacy policy. You also need to verify your bank’s name via SMS>Allow. You would need to tap the bank’s account you want to use to send and receive payments through WhatsApp. To verify your debit card, you must tap, continue and tap, ‘verify card.’
Step 2: Once you have added your bank account to WhatsApp, you can send money to anyone. Go to the chat window of the person you want to send the money to, tap on the rupee symbol (payments icon). Enter the rupee amount you would like to send, tap next, and click on send payment.
Step 3: But that won’t initiate the payment. You will need verify the payment by entering your UPI PIN. You would be asked to confirm your UPI PIN before sending a payment. In case you haven’t already set up a UPI PIN yet, you would be asked to do so first by verifying the last six digits of your debit card and the expiration date.
Step 4: Finally, you need to confirm the status of your payment. To check whether your payment went through successfully, you need to check the status of your transfer in the chat, or, view the list of past transactions in the payments settings.
The important thing to note here is that the recipient needs to have an active WhatsApp account. Second, the money gets transferred only after the sender verifies the payment process with the UPI PIN. Just pressing on the ‘Send’ button won’t initiate the transaction.
Developed by the National Payments Corporation of India (NCPI), UPI is an instant real-time payment system, which facilitates inter-bank peer-to-peer and person-to-merchant transactions. UPI is used by over 20 million stores in the country to initiate transactions, and it is considered to be one of the most convenient methods of making digital payments.
