WhatsApp Pay Will Soon Launch in India, Says Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook is inching closer to launch much-anticipated WhatsApp Pay in India and will shortly have a positive news to share, the visitor'due south 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 exam going in India. The test really shows that a lot of people are going to want to use this product. Nosotros"re very optimistic that we"re going to be able to launch to anybody in India before long, but of grade volition share more than news when we accept that", Zuckerberg told analysts on an earnings call on Midweek.

The peer-to-peer, UPI-based WhatsApp Pay service will achieve over 400 million users – especially the small and medium businesses (SMBs) – to heave digital inclusion in the land. The authorities and the Reserve Banking company of Bharat (RBI) accept expressed concerns over some of WhatsApp's features in complying with the regulations.

WhatsApp had before said it had built a local system to shop payments-related information to comply with the RBI's data localization requirement, but subsequently in an affidavit submitted to the Supreme Court, the RBI said WhatsApp'south Pay is notwithstanding 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 practice with WhatsApp payments or when nosotros make payments in Instagram Shopping, and our work with something like Libra that is trying to build some new technological infrastructure for fiscal 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 commencement digital payment operations in the country.

It is nearly a necessity for WhatsApp to launch the payment service every bit 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 boss the digital payments industry in the land which is estimated to hit $1 trillion by 2023.

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

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