WhatsApp Pay May Be Available To Indian Users Later This Year

Official Launch Of A New Payment Service

Indian users will finally be able to use the payment service WhatsApp Pay at the end of this year. The company first introduced the peer-to-peer, UPI-based Pay service on February 2018; however, this service has been in a beta phase and just available to limited users.

At an event held in New Delhi, the Global Head of WhatsApp Will Cathcart revealed,

The company has delayed the official release of WhatsApp Pay after it didn’t manage to satisfy the local framework guidelines of digital payments. However, the Indian government still allowed it to run the service’s trials with limited users. Back to June 2018, according to the revelation from WhatsApp, there were a million Indian users who were experiencing the trial version of this payment service.

WhatsApp also made a commitment with the Supreme Court that the company would follow all data localization norms as prescribed by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) before its launch of the official payment service.

At this event, the CEO of Niti Aayog Amitabh Kant made a speech pointing out that the company didn’t meet the regulatory norms of India, and therefore, it couldn’t bring the service to all of the Indian users.

Kant further said, “We look forward to WhatsApp Pay in India once it fulfills all the regulatory requirements.”

At the beginning of 2019, Mark Zuckerberg revealed that Facebook was “actively working to launch WhatsApp Pay” in the Indian market.

The Facebook CEO said,

The Battle between WhatsApp Pay and Paytm

The company hopes that WhatsApp Pay will be able to beat Paytm over. At present, Paytm is among the most prominent digital payment firm in India. On the contrary, WhatsApp houses a lot of advantages, such as a huge user base in the Indian market (more than 300 million). Along with the new payment service’s launch, WhatsApp may have a chance to compete with Paytm that previously reported more than 230 million users.

According to the Counterpoint Research’s Associate Director Tarun Pathak,