A freeware, cross-platform messaging and the Voice over IP (VoIP) service, WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook retained its backs into the digital payments market in India, with its own WhatsApp Pay. The company rolled out the feature to a number of users in India for beta testing, on the other hand, due to nonfulfillment with certain of RBI rules in the nation, WhatsApp Pay may possibly not be formally rolled out to entire users in the nation up till now.
At the present, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says that WhatsApp is testing the feature in India in complete swing, and is going to be rolled out shortly as soon as possible. However, the timeline is still unknown but it will be clear soon.
A recent report by Business Standard quotes Mark Zuckerberg as saying at Facebook’s earnings call, “What we’re going to end up seeing is building out payments, which is going to end up being something that we do country by country. We have a test that is running in India for WhatsApp now. We’re hoping to launch in several other countries at some point, but I don’t want to put a timeframe on that here. But it’s something that we’re actively working on.”
At the call, Zuckerberg allegedly said that WhatsApp Pay is going to be horizontally incorporated with Instagram as well as Facebook, so that the operators can complete the transactions and follow up with dealings separately and have a continuing relationship through Messenger and WhatsApp.
India is also undergoing a boom in mobile payment apps especially after the government declared plans to demonetize large denomination bank notes in a work to crash down on tax evasion and fakes. This then headed to a lack of cash in hand in the country where cash is still very much king as compared to the mobile payment or digital money apps. Progressively, people in India started using mobile payment apps and now many of the people in the country has shifted their interest in mobile payment apps.
If we talk about WhatsApp then it is by some measures is more popular than compared to Facebook itself in India. Amazingly this messaging app has already been adapted by many people in India to play astonishing roles in the country’s economy. Analysts Neil Shah said that the app is already used informally to sell goods. He said, “I’ve seen people selling baby clothes, medicines, art and craft supplies — it’s become a Craigslist type of offering.”
While talking about the WhatsApp Pay, as per to the recent report the WhatsApp Pay may possibly take five more months to completely confine its payments data and go live in India. What precisely WhatsApp is going to offer the users isn’t clear at this point, but the move is reasonable, possibly even required.
Presently, only a segment of the 200 million active WhatsApp operators in India can use the features of WhatsApp Pay and they can merely do small value transactions which have been permitted by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).
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