Select WhatsApp users in the United States of America are now getting the ability to use a new payments service in the application. Novi’s head, Stephan Kasriel has confirmed that a “limited number of users” in the country will now get to send and receive money via the payments platform on WhatsApp, with this news first reported by XDA Developers.
This is a rather important move since Novi integration makes the US the next target from WhatsApp when it comes to mobile payments after a push in India.
For our US readers, you will be happy to know that Novi will allow you to send and receive cash to other contacts on WhatsApp with zero additional fees. Add to this, users are also free to transfer money at their own convenience, with no account holding fees.
WhatsApp Navi Payment Will Let You Send and Receive Money!
To do all of this, you do need to have a Novi account, since you won’t be able to make use of this feature without a specific account. As of now, the platform uses Pax Dollars, which is a cryptocurrency that levels US’s dollar value, which should make it easy for you to transfer equivalent amounts in dollars.
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One thing to note, as mentioned earlier is that not all users will get to use this feature as of now, and you do need to run the latest version of the application to use this payments feature. To use the feature if you have it, you can select the Payment icon.
In other news, WhatsApp recently won regulatory approval from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) to expand its WhatsApp Pay payments service in India to 40 million users.
What Else is Application Working on?
As of now, WhatsApp Pay is based on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) platform. It’s limited to 20 million users in India, and while getting the nod from NPCI to double the user is good news, it may not be so good for WhatsApp itself.
The fact is that the company had a much higher goal with its request. The company tried to lift the cap entirely, but only managed to double the number of users allowed in the platform.
This isn’t an expressive mark as a country with more than 2 billion people certainly has more than 100 million active WhatsApp users. The previously approved limit makes up only 8 per cent of WhatsApp’s 500 million-strong user base in India.
