WhatsApp, a subsidiary of Meta, has secured regulatory approval to double the number of users of its payment service in India to 100 million.
For years, WhatsApp has asked the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) not to limit the number of users of its service. India itself is WhatsApp's biggest market to date.
Reported by Reuters from Reuters, NPCI also gave permission for WhatsApp to be able to increase the number of its subscribers which currently number from 40 million to 100 million.
However, these new restrictions may still limit WhatsApp's growth prospects given that the app has more than 500 million users in India.
WhatsApp has asked NPCI to allow them to operate indefinitely. But the NPCI itself has reasons where if all WhatsApp users in India access a payment service that is integrated with the application and allows contacts to send funds to each other, it is burdening the country's financial infrastructure.
The NPCI also gave approval to WhatsApp to launch a payments service in 2020 after the company spent years trying to comply with Indian regulations, including a data retention rule that requires all payment-related data to be stored locally.
Initially operating, the payment service WhatsApp in India had 20 million users and the limit has now increased to 40 million in November last year.
WhatsApp is competing with Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O) Google Pay, SoftBank and Ant Group-backed Paytm (PAYT.NS) and Walmart (WMT.N) PhonePe in India's bustling digital marketplace.