WhatsApp has begun testing a new payments feature in India that will allow people to send money to other WhatsApp users, excluding merchant accounts.

Referring to sources familiar with the company’s plans, Тechcrunch.com reports that the feature is currently in beta. This version is available for iOS and Android users with payments made only between WhatsApp Pay wallets.

The company has been working on support for a payments feature for some time, which would take advantage of UPI (Unified Payments Interface) and include support by a number of Indian banks, including State Bank of India, ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, and Axis Bank.

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According to the Economic Times’ information, the company received government approval to integrate with UPI in July last year. WhatsApp’s payments feature is highly anticipated because of the huge popularity of the app across diverse populations in India. WhatsApp, which has crossed 1 billion downloads globally, has more than 200 million monthly active users in India.

“In China, mobile payments volume doubled to around USD 5 trillion in 2016 mainly driven by Alipay and WeChat Pay. Tencent-owned WeChat has about 963 million monthly active users and Alipay about 520 million users. If India is going the China way in digital payments, it only shows the potential that app-based payments have in a country where smartphone penetration is growing rapidly and the central bank is promoting instant settlements in a major way,” the newspaper reports.

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