In April, when Facebook invested $5.7 billion in India’s Reliance Jio, it was thought that Reliance Industries’ Mukesh Ambani might help with getting WhatsApp Pay launched in India. But the impact so far has been limited. Yesterday the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which oversees the Unified Payment Interface (UPI), said WhatsApp Pay could go live with up to 20 million users.
However, it had already given the go-ahead for ten million users in February this year after it blocked the WhatsApp Pay launch in 2018.
Given that India’s WhatsApp userbase is around 400 million, the 20 million figure represents just five percent. India is the largest market for both Facebook and its subsidiary WhatsApp, but it doesn’t make much money there. The average user in North America earns almost 12 times more for Facebook than a user in Asia-Pacific, including India.
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