With a sleuth of new features rolling out like the Communities feature and also increasing the limit for group phone calls to 32 people, WhatsApp might soon be back on track to be the one app for everything in India thanks to the latest updates to its payments feature.
The Meta-owned messaging app has plans to provide cashback of up to Rs 33 for users who initiate payment transactions through the app after they recently received approval from the National Payments Corporation of India (NCPI) to increase the limit of users who can use the payments feature up to 100 million from the prior limit of 40 million.
According to a report by Moneycontrol, the messaging app will be competing with Google Pay and PhonePe to enable UPI payments directly through the chat by introducing cashback. It also states that the cashback will be divided between 3 transactions that are done on the app. There are also no minimum amount limits placed to avail of the offer.
A study conducted by WhatsApp in India has provided insights that many users in the country stay with the competing apps for the cashback and coupons that are provided for every transaction. Now that the company is able to reach a much larger audience, they will be rolling out the cashback offers to users in a phased manner.
WhatsApp Companion device
WhatsApp could soon provide us with an alternative method to stay logged into multiple devices. The feature being tested by the instant messaging app is to register a second ‘companion device’.
According to the latest post by WABetaInfo, the new feature was spotted in the WhatsApp beta for Android version 2.22.10.13 today. We could expect the feature to also come to the iOS beta version as well in the near future. The post indicates that the feature will only show up if a user tries to log in to their WhatsApp account on a second device.
This may extend the current method of allowing multi-login not just to the desktop and web apps, but also to other devices. Many users have been asking for a similar feature for years.
There does not seem that there are any deviations from the way you would link a device to your WhatsApp account, but we would have to wait for more updates in the future.
War of cashbacks
It is no secret that cashbacks are the secret weapon that help you bring in and also retain users on any payment and services platforms. Now that WhatsApp is entering the playing field, you can expect to see marketing campaigns to entice users and provide maximum cashbacks than competing apps.
And while cashbacks are important, it will be interesting to see if WhatsApp will be able to maintain a low payment failure track record once the volume of transactions and number of users also increase.
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