At Zuckerberg-Ambani Talk, Facebook CEO Pushes WhatsApp Pay
Technology

At Zuckerberg-Ambani Talk, Facebook CEO Pushes WhatsApp Pay

November 25, 2020
MarketingMindsKnowledge

New Delhi: Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday said India is a very special and important country with a remarkable entrepreneurship culture, as he sought to push deeper into the just-launched payments services that allow users to make payments over WhatsApp.

Last month, Facebook-owned WhatsApp received approval from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) for rolling out its payments services in India. In 2018, WhatsApp started testing its UPI-based payments services in India – a global first – with about a million users.

“We just launched WhatsApp payments in India last month – now you can send money to your friends and family through WhatsApp, as easily as sending a message. That was possible because of the UPI system that has been built in India,” Zuckerberg said during a fireside chat with Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani.

 

 

 

He said the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) makes it easy for anyone to instantly accept payments across different apps.

Referring to late Dhirubhai Ambani’s vision of affordable connectivity in the country, Zuckerberg said, “… today Indians can communicate with one another for less than the cost of a postcard and that’s what we’ve tried to do with messaging… and hopefully we can do that together with payments and make it so people can use India’s new UPI system, which I think is just great”.
Following the NPCI approval, WhatsApp has started its payments service in the country in a “graded” manner, starting with a maximum registered user base of 20 million in UPI. WhatsApp – which counts India as its biggest market with over 400 million users – will compete with players like Paytm, Google Pay, Walmart-owned PhonePe, and Amazon Pay in the country.