WhatsApp payments fail to click in India
Figures are dismal for the messaging platform in peer-topeer transactions
Facebook-owned WhatsApp, which kicked off its ambitious peer-to-peer (P2P) digital payments pilot project in India in 2018 with nearly 1 million users, has failed to make it a success ever after more than three years of its inception, as the transaction value of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) payments continues to break all records in the country.
In the month of September, 3.65 billion transactions worth Rs6.5 trillion were recorded. Major UPI players in India currently are PhonePe, IPO-bound PayTM and Google Pay. PhonePe continues to dominate transactions — almost half the market size at 47 per cent, followed by Google Pay at 35 per cent.
The current figures are dismal for the Mark Zuckerbergrun platform. The late entrant WhatsApp currently has a mere 0.01 per cent share of the UPI payments volume, according to the latest NPCI data.
After facing regulatory roadblocks and data compliance issues with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for more than two years, WhatsApp finally
went live with the UPI payment service in India in November last year, after receiving a nod from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).
Phased approval
The Facebook-owned messaging service had received approval from the NPCI to take UPI live in a phased manner.
WhatsApp Payments is still restricted to the cap of some 20 million users in the country, the growth has stalled and numbers evidently paint a sorry picture.
What has failed WhatsApp, which has more than 400 million
users in India, to fast-track its payments feature in a country, dominated by the likes of PayTM, PhonePe and Google Pay?
Industry experts feel it is a mixed bag, led by the heated political debate on the security of key financial data, latest Facebook data-sharing row, insufficient messaging for its users and uncertainties over the regulation landscape.
“WhatsApp Payments needs to be seen with microscopic eye, primarily because in payment you will be dealing with sensitive personal data and cyber security is going to be an essential building block component for WhatsApp to demonstrate its due diligence,” Pavan Duggal, one of the nation’s top cyber law experts, said.
Prabhu Ram, Head, Industry Intelligence Group (IIG), CyberMedia Research (CMR), said that for India, WhatsApp has been the de facto messaging app of choice for long now.
“Leveraging WhatsApp’s reach and scale in other spheres, such as mobile payments, would seem an easy and natural step forward for the platform. However, WhatsApp’s strong brand resonance around messaging is hindering WhatsApp’s uptick in payments,” Ram said.