Apps & Consumer
WhatsApp adds prepaid mobile recharges in India
WhatsApp is launching prepaid mobile recharges in India via a partnership with PayU, aiming to boost in-app transaction utility despite its marginal market share.
On Thursday, WhatsApp announced that it is partnering with fintech firm PayU to launch prepaid phone recharges in India. These recharges function as top-up services for mobile accounts. Through this partnership, users will be able to top up their prepaid mobile numbers for mobile operators, including Jio, Airtel, and Vodafone Idea, directly within the messaging application.
Despite having more than 500 million users in India, the Meta-owned platform remains a marginal player in the country’s digital payments space. This market is heavily driven by the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), which is the government-backed digital payments system in India. According to data released by the National Payments Corporation of India, WhatsApp’s transaction volume lags far behind its competitors. In March, the transaction volumes for the key players in the market were:
- PhonePe: more than 10.5 billion transactions
- Google Pay: 7.5 billion transactions
- WhatsApp: over 130 million transactions
This gap between WhatsApp and its competitors has persisted in the digital payments space despite regulatory changes. WhatsApp originally launched its payments service in 2020, but faced years of phased rollouts. In late 2024, the National Payments Corporation of India lifted onboarding limits on WhatsApp Pay, allowing the service to expand to its entire user base in the country.
Following the removal of these restrictions, WhatsApp payments usage picked up in early 2025. The platform’s UPI transactions more than doubled from about 61 million in January 2025, according to the data from the National Payments Corporation of India. Over the same period, competitors PhonePe and Google Pay grew by around 30% and around 20%, respectively, allowing them to maintain their hold on the majority of UPI transaction volumes.
The addition of mobile recharges is part of a broader effort by WhatsApp to increase the utility of its application. Ravi Garg, the director of business messaging at Meta India, noted that “the updates are aimed at making everyday transactions simpler within WhatsApp as the company aims to bring more utility into the app.”
Why it matters
WhatsApp is adding prepaid phone recharges in India to drive in-app transactions, even as it struggles to gain meaningful ground against dominant players like PhonePe and Google Pay.