WhatsApp announced on Friday that it is set to launch Whatsapp Pay in India, AFP reported. The announcement came just hours after the messaging platform was given permission by the country’s payments regulator — National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).

With 400 million users, India is WhatsApp’s largest market.

Mark Zuckerberg, who owns the company, released a video statement in which he said the launch would boost “innovation” in payments, AFP reported.

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Zuckerberg also hailed India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) which is used in the country of 1.3 billion people to manage payment apps, with more than 140 Indian banks part of the network.

UPI is also used by Alphabet Inc’s Google Pay, Walmart’s PhonePe and Alibaba-backed Paytm, which dominate India’s digital payments market.

“India is the first country to do anything like this,” said Zuckerberg of the network.

India’s UPI processed more than two billion transactions in October and 1.8 billion the previous month.

The stakes are high for all the competitors as the digital payments market was worth about $75 billion in 2019 and is expected to rise past $500 billion by 2025.

WhatsApp has linked up with five Indian lenders including State Bank of India, the largest public sector institution, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Axis Bank and Jio Payments Bank to roll out the service.

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The NPCI has put a cap of 20 million users of the Whatsapp service in the first phase. All must have a debit card and a bank account.

The American firm has been waiting for two years to launch its service, testing pilot payments for about a million customers.