Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],

Call it an occupational hazard or force of habit from tracking payments for five years, I end up keeping an eye out for new features on UPI (Unified Payments Interface) apps. And that doesn’t mean just new ways to pay or shave off a few seconds from what are already supposed to be “instant” digital payments. There are a lot of behind-the-scenes dynamics in the way these features are rolled out. 

Our edition today is about one such feature that has been out for a few months now, but remained largely under the radar. 

The little big nudge 

In 2018, when Facebook-owned WhatsApp quietly launched its payments feature in India, people gushed over how seamless using the new feature was. Users said WhatsApp payments had the best user experience when it came to transferring money person-to-person. In fact, it was almost… too seamless. We wrote in our story then that WhatsApp was able to deliver this experience by over-riding some core principles of UPI interoperability.