Facebook has been testing WhatsApp payments in India for years
India allowed Facebook Inc. to start operating its WhatsApp payments service in the world’s largest open technology market.
WhatsApp Pay can be activated through the homegrown multi-bank unified payments interface, the National Payments Corporation of India said in a statement Thursday. The US firm can gradually expand its UPI base starting with up to 20 million users. Facebook has been testing WhatsApp payments in India for years, but regulatory hurdles have kept the app pilot projecting to a very small number of users.
India’s payments market is filled with national pioneer Paytm, Alphabet Inc.’s Google Pay, Walmart Inc.’s PhonePe, Amazon.com Inc.’s Amazon Pay, and dozens of other startups. However, given its huge user base of more than 400 million, WhatsApp has the potential to compete with the leaders and reshape digital payments in India, a market that is set to grow to $ 1 trillion by 2023.
Unlike other rivals, WhatsApp will be able to add clients to its payment service organically due to the popularity of its messaging application in the country. India is WhatsApp’s largest market and an important country for Facebook, which is looking for areas to add new users as more lucrative markets like the United States and Europe saturate.
Facebook earlier this year bought a 9.99 percent stake in Jio Platforms, the digital services company owned by Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man, and Facebook has been open about its ambition to build a big business. commercial in India with WhatsApp messaging at the center. Some analysts have said that Facebook’s partnership with Ambani would help the company navigate the country’s regulatory environment. Regulators have blocked some of Facebook’s previous business efforts in India, including a program that offered free internet access to a limited number of websites.
WhatsApp has added business features in recent years, including product and store catalogs, so that small businesses can promote and sell products directly through the app. Payments are a key part of enabling those transactions. The company also hopes to use these product catalogs as a starting point to lead small businesses to other Facebook services, such as advertising and customer service tools.
Facebook executives envision WhatsApp serving as a one-stop shop for small Indian businesses, which can sell products and engage with customers on a service already used by hundreds of millions of people in the country. They hope to replicate that plan in other markets, such as Brazil, although efforts to bring payments there have also faced regulatory challenges.
A WhatsApp spokesperson declined to comment.
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