Skip to main content

WhatsApp Pay Will Soon Launch in India, Says Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook is inching closer to launch much-anticipated WhatsApp Pay in India and will soon have a positive news to share, the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said. Data compliance issues and regulations have kept WhatsApp Pay launch in abeyance for quite some time, despite a successful test run of the payments service with one million users in the country.

“We have our test going in India. The test really shows that a lot of people are going to want to use this product. We”re very optimistic that we”re going to be able to launch to everyone in India soon, but of course will share more news when we have that”, Zuckerberg told analysts on an earnings call on Wednesday.

The peer-to-peer, UPI-based WhatsApp Pay service will reach over 400 million users – especially the small and medium businesses (SMBs) – to boost digital inclusion in the country. The government and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) have expressed concerns over some of WhatsApp’s features in complying with the regulations.

WhatsApp had earlier said it had built a local system to store payments-related data to comply with the RBI’s data localization requirement, but later in an affidavit submitted to the Supreme Court, the RBI said WhatsApp’s Pay is yet to comply with its data localization norms.

“We differentiate between payment systems that are built on top of the existing financial infrastructure like what we”re trying to do with WhatsApp payments or when we make payments in Instagram Shopping, and our work with something like Libra that is trying to build some new technological infrastructure for financial services”, Zuckerberg elaborated.

Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has said if WhatsApp meets the regulatory norms from RBI and National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), then it should be allowed to start digital payment operations in the country.

It is nearly a necessity for WhatsApp to launch the payment service as it is in direct competition with giants like Alphabet”s Google Pay, Walmart-owned PhonePe, Amazon Pay and Alibaba-backed Paytm. These companies are in a fierce competition to dominate the digital payments industry in the country which is estimated to hit $1 trillion by 2023.

According to a report by Omidyar Network and the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), nearly half of MSME owners with annual business revenue between Rs 3 lakh and Rs 75 crore would use WhatsApp Payments once it is fully rolled out.

During the earnings call, Dave Wehner, Chief Financial Officer at Facebook, said daily active users reached 1.62 billion, up 9 per cent compared to last year, led by growth in India, Indonesia and the Philippines. “This represents approximately 66 per cent of the 2.45 billion monthly active users in September”, Wehner informed.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 5i Review: A Powerful Workhorse

It’s been quite some time since Intel announced its 11th-gen laptop processors, complete with the new logo design and Intel Iris Xe graphics. And yet, so far I’ve not gotten my hands on a laptop packing the new processor and iGPU. That all changed when Lenovo sent over the IdeaPad Slim 5i (Rs. 61,990) with […] The article Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 5i Review: A Powerful Workhorse was first published on Beebom
Post a Comment
Read more

Twitter Wants to Build an ‘Open and Decentralized’ Social Media Platform

In an attempt to create a Facebook competitor, which everyone flocks to, Twitter became increasingly centralized over the years. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey believes that’s the case and has now tweeted a lengthy plan to fund research to build an open and decentralized standard for social media platforms. It will “ultimately become a standard” that Twitter’s client will be based upon. Dubbed Bluesky, this project will see a team of up to five researchers , which could include open-source architects, engineers, and designers, being on-boarded in the near future. Currently, Bluesky has no team members but Dorsey tweeted that Twitter’s CTO Parag Agrawal has been tasked with finding a lead. The folks over at Firefox have already extended a helping hand, saying how the non-profit has contributed to decentralization. Enough jibber-jabber, but what exactly is Bluesky? And what does it intend to achieve? Dorsey, in his tweetstorm , states that the challenges being faced by centralized social...
Post a Comment
Read more

Mysterious Drones Spotted in Colorado and Nebraska; Sources Unknown

A group of drones was reportedly been spotted in the sky at night last week in Colorado and Nebraska that made the residents anxious and worried. The police officials in charge have no idea regarding where these drones are from. “They’ve been doing a grid search, a grid pattern. They fly one square and then they fly another square,”  Colorado’s Phillips County Sheriff Thomas Elliot told the Denver Post. The drones have an approximate six-foot wingspan and stay 200 to 300 feet away from buildings. At least 17 drones have been spotted till now. They appear at around 7 PM at night and disappear at around 10 PM . Until now, the drones have not been caught doing any illegal or unofficial activities.  “They do not seem to be malicious. They don’t seem to be doing anything that would indicate criminal activity,” Sheriff Elliott added. The Federal Aviation Agency, the Air Force, Drug Enforcement Administration, and US Army Forces Command confirmed that the drones did not belong t...
Post a Comment
Read more