WhatsApp widens payment operations in 'priority market' India
India is among the 'priority' markets for WhatsApp Business Messaging and Meta wants to provide users with a choice when it comes to payments. The company has therefore opened up access to payments via WhatsApp Business messaging, allowing customers to pay businesses on the app with the UPI option of their liking in addition to debit and credit cards, Nikila Srinivasan, global vice-president, Business Messaging at Meta told ET on Wednesday.
Earlier in the day, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Meta was expanding the ways that people can pay for things within a chat thread.
He said that the company had launched its own payment solution in Brazil and in Singapore, and said that it was going to be brought to India.
«With payments in India, we're going to support other payment methods as well, including all UPI apps. This is going to make it even easier for people to pay Indian businesses within a WhatsApp chat using whatever method they prefer,» he said.
ET had reported on Wednesday that Whatsapp is launching features which will expand its ambitious bet WhatsApp Pay in India.
It will also expand on enabling direct interface between merchants and customers where they will let users avail service delivery and make payments for it directly to merchants through WhatsApp.
WhatsApp has more than 500 million users in India, though regulators have capped its in-app WhatsApp Pay service to only 100 million people.
«The focus right now is to give people more choice,» Srinivasan explained. «The best way for us to do the right thing by people and businesses is to give them more choices to complete that transaction on WhatsApp end-to-end.
