WhatsApp Pay Will Be Launched In India Soon, Mark Zuckerberg Said

Facebook has been testing WhatsApp Pay for some time now, and due to regulations and issues relating to data compliance, the feature has not been able to make it to reality. However, this will not be the case anymore as Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, said that WhatsApp Pay would be launched soon to Indian users.

In an earnings call, Zuckerberg told analysts that a large number of India would want to use their product, and the company was optimistic about the outcome of this project.

The government of India requires that all data of the country’s citizens must be stored locally. Even if the information is sent to another country to process, it has to return to India to be stored. The RBI and the government have shown concerns that the product of Facebook does not meet these demands.

Vijay Sharman, Paytm’s CEO, also expressed his concerns over the fact that WhatsApp itself did not make use of two-factor authentication that can be found on other payment apps like Google Pay (widely known as Tez) and Paytm.

However, as Zuckerberg is optimistic that WhatsApp Pay will be released, it appears that the company has found a way to conform to the rules of NCPI (short for National Payments Corporation of India) and RBI (stand for Reserve Bank of India). If Facebook cannot launch its payment app, it will fail to gain a portion of a trillion-dollar market.

The race to be the market leader now has the participation of Paytm, backed by Alibaba, Google Pay, Amazon Pay, and PhonePe, owned by Walmart. WhatsApp has a huge advantage of having more than 400 million Indian users, meaning it has already had a head start.

In September, UPI had one billion transactions with Paytm, PhonePe, and Google Pay making up 90%. The platform is operated by NPCI and the organization is planning to launch it in international markets like UAE and Singapore.