With the digital payments market heating up in India as major players enter it, Facebook-owned WhatsApp Pay is expected to be a game-changer. According to a report in the Economic Times of India, since Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg revealed in April that WhatsApp Pay is coming to India, the marketplace has been bracing for the latest entrance. As its stands, Amazon is going after the market, announcing Amazon Pay UPI for Android, while Google Pay already counts 45 million Indians as customers and Apple Pay is going after the market. At the same Paytm, the local digital payment company that has the backing of Alibaba, the Chinese eCommerce giant, is the leader in the market. But despite the formidable competitors, industry watchers expect WhatsApp Pay to have a huge impact on the industry. The reason, according to the report: it has a real chance of becoming the leading digital payment player, given its current user base. In India, WhatsApp has more than 300 million users. Facebook brings an additional 300 Indian customers to the company. The report noted that once its UPI peer-to-peer payment service is up and running it will easily surpass Paytm, which has more than 230 million users. “Indians love WhatsApp, and will love the convenience of transacting through the app. I foresee a trend wherein entrepreneurs and small and medium enterprises start embracing and using WhatsApp Pay,” Prabhu Ram, head of the Industry Intelligence Group at CMR, said in the report. “This will contribute to, and increase their creditworthiness. In turn, this trend will enable them to easily borrow credit from formal sources, such as banks.” WhatsApp Pay, which is facilitated by the Indian government’s UPI payments system, began testing its service in the country earlier this year with around one million users. Currently, there are more than 1 billion mobile phone users in the country, and the digital payments market is expected to reach $1 trillion by 2023.<doc-sep>When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on April 24 that the company is actively working on to launch WhatsApp Pay in India, the message was clear to the digital payments leader in the country: Brace for the landfall. The country`s digital payments industry -- estimated to hit $1 trillion by 2023 -- is going to witness a seismic change this year with global players joining the bandwagon, creating flutters among the existing players, including Alibaba-backed Paytm which rules the market. Amazon just announced the launch of Amazon Pay UPI for Android customers in the peer-to-peer (P2P) transaction market. Google Pay has also strengthened its presence -- over 45 million users with recording $81 billion in transactions (at an annualised run-rate) in March. Apple Pay would also arrive and with the lowering of iPhone prices in India, the service which has 390 million paid subscriptions globally and on track to reach 10 billion transactions -- would reach more hands. WhatsApp Pay, however, is going to be the real game changer -- for a simple reason that it has the capability to become the top player in the Indian digital payments market with the word go. WhatsApp currently has over 300 million users in India (Facebook has another 300 million in the country) and once it starts peer-to-peer (P2P) UPI-based payments service, the sheer numbers will take it beyond Paytm which last reported over 230 million users. "Indians love WhatsApp, and will love the convenience of transacting through the app. I foresee a trend wherein entrepreneurs and small and medium enterprises start embracing and using WhatsApp Pay," Prabhu Ram, Head, Industry Intelligence Group (IIG), CMR, told IANS. "This will contribute to, and increase their creditworthiness. In turn, this trend will enable them to easily borrow credit from formal sources, such as banks," Ram added. Paytm Founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma is aware that fierce global competition is coming his way. Sharma last year launched a Twitter attack on WhatsApp`s parent company Facebook. "After failing to win war against India`s open internet with cheap tricks of free basics, Facebook is again in play," Sharma had tweeted. According to WhatsApp, almost one million people tested WhatsApp Pay to send money to each other in a simple and secure way. "In response to India`s payments data circular, we`ve built a system that stores payments-related data locally in India," a WhatsApp spokesperson had told IANS. "WhatsApp Payment is useful for people in their daily lives and we hope to expand the feature to all of India soon so we can contribute to the country`s financial inclusion goals," the spokesperson added. The company on May 3 told the Supreme Court that it would comply with the Reserve Bank of India`s (RBI) data localisation norms before launching the full payments service in the country. According to Pavel Naiya, Senior Analyst, Devices and Ecosystem at Hong Kong-based Counterpoint Research, WhatsApp Pay will become an instant threat for products like Paytm Wallet and others who are using UPI as a method of transaction. "With the huge user base, WhatsApp Pay is already a good match to become a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) platform for real-time payment," Naiya told IANS. The entry of WhatApp Pay will give a significantly more positive and viral impetus to India`s digital economy. "The rapid adoption of digital payments in India will be driven by WhatsApp, riding on its vast user base and strong vernacular language focus," added Ram. Zuckerberg would finally merge all his platforms and the enormous user base would create a natural winner. "In Instagram and Facebook, you have shopping and you have Marketplace, and you have all the tens of millions of small businesses that use Pages and a lot use Instagram for sharing their inventory and being able to help people discover and pay," the Facebook CEO told analysts during the earnings call. According to Naiya, with Facebook and Instagram`s platform support, "WhatsApp Pay is likely to further extend beyond P2P platform to become a payment gateway for the company`s social commerce in the future". The die is cast. It is only matter of time when the Indian digital payments market sees a new leader.<doc-sep>Facebook-owned WhatsApp is being censored in China as the Communist Party congress gets underway. Facebook has selected London as the center to develop WhatsApp's drive into the mobile payments industry. The messaging service will ramp up hiring, taking on 100 new software engineers for its payments platform. Most of the hires will be based in London, with additional roles in Dublin. "We're eager to work with some of the best technical and operational experts in both London and Dublin to take WhatsApp into its second decade," Matt Idema, WhatsApp's chief operating officer, said in an emailed statement on Wednesday. "WhatsApp is a truly global service and these teams will help us provide WhatsApp payments and other great features for our users everywhere." The news was first reported by the Financial Times. The move to choose London over a U.S. city could be seen as tactical, given that WhatsApp is widely used in the U.K. and its capital city is considered a hub for fintech. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been bullish on the firm's push into payments. The social network's payments play could put it on course to compete with PayPal's Venmo and a host of other money transfer apps. "I believe it should be as easy to send money to someone as it is to send a photo," Zuckerberg said at Facebook's annual F8 developer conference last month.<doc-sep>
Facebook has chosen London as the payments hub for WhatsApp. According to the Financial Times, the app will hire about 100 people. While most of the software engineers will be in London, additional operations staff will be based in Dublin. New staff will build a payments function, as well as develop products to boost safety and prevent spam on the app. The social media giant revealed that it chose the U.K. because it attracts a multicultural workforce from many of the countries where WhatsApp is popular. Last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that WhatsApp’s mobile payments would launch in several countries this year, after a successful pilot in India. WhatsApp Pay, which is facilitated by the Indian government’s UPI payments system, began testing its service in the country earlier this year with around 1 million users. “Payments is one of the areas where we have an opportunity to make it a lot easier. I believe it should be as easy to send money to someone as it is to send a photo,” Zuckerberg said at the F8 developers conference. Senior engineers from the WhatsApp founding team were already sent to London late last year to recruit people for the hub. “We’re eager to work with some of the best technical and operational experts in both London and Dublin to take WhatsApp into its second decade. WhatsApp is a truly global service, and these teams will help us provide WhatsApp payments and other great features for our users everywhere,” said Matthew Idema, WhatsApp’s chief operating officer. One issue the U.K. team will be working on is the misuse of the WhatsApp platform, including the sharing of child abuse imagery, as well as misleading and false information.