WhatsApp Pay Will Expand to More Countries This Year: Zuckerberg

Jan. 30, 2020

Beyond WhatsApp Payments, the company is working on several other efforts to help facilitate more commerce from Facebook Marketplace to Instagram Shopping and its work on Facebook Pay or thedigital currency Libra.“We’re taking a number of different approaches here, ranging from people buying and selling to each other directly to businesses setting up storefronts, to people engaging with businesses directly through messaging and a number of things on payments ranging from existing — using existing national systems like India’s UPI to creating new global systems”, said the Facebook CEO, hailing the UPI system again.

The peer-to-peer, UPI-based WhatsApp Pay service will reach over 400 million users — especially the small and medium businesses (SMBs) — to boost digital inclusion in the country.“Having small businesses succeed is not only key to creating broad economic growth where everyone can support themselves, it’s also important to maintaining healthy communities since small businesses are often where people come together”, said Zuckerberg.

The Indian government and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) haveexpressed concerns over some of WhatsApp’s featuresin complying with the regulations.“On payments, we’re focused in different places with different products. For things like Instagram and even a lot of what we’re doing on Facebook, it’s a lot more developed countries. For WhatsApp, it’s the biggest countries on WhatsApp. So countries like India and Mexico and Brazil and Indonesia will make up a large part of the community on WhatsApp”, he elaborated.