Zuckerberg Hints At ‘Positive News’ For WhatsApp Pay In India Despite Issues About Compliance With Local Norms

Facebook is inching closer to launch much-anticipated WhatsApp Pay in India and will soon have “positive news” to share, the company's CEO Mark Zuckerberg told analysts recently, during an earnings call.

It may be recalled that data compliance issues related to data localization and other Reserve Bank of India (RBI) regulations had kept WhatsApp Pay launch in abeyance for quite some time, despite a successful test run of the payments service with one million users in the country.

However, recently, WhatsApp's global head Will Cathcart too had stated that WhatsApp is all set to roll out its payments service in India this year and that it is now in full compliance with India’s data localization norms. This statement had led to expectations that WhatsApp’s payment platform, based on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), could see a full rollout in India by the end of 2019.

“We're very optimistic that we're going to be able to launch to everyone in India soon, but of course will share more news when we have that,” Zuckerberg stated recently.

The peer-to-peer, UPI-based WhatsApp Pay service is expected to reach over 400 million users though the government and the RBI had expressed concerns over some of WhatsApp's features in complying with local regulations.

Earlier, WhatsApp had stated that it had built a local system to store payments-related data to comply with the RBI's data localization requirement, but later in an affidavit submitted to the Supreme Court, the RBI had stated that WhatsApp's Pay is yet to comply with its data localization norms.

“We differentiate between payment systems that are built on top of the existing financial infrastructure like what we're trying to do with WhatsApp payments or when we make payments in Instagram Shopping, and our work with something like Libra that is trying to build some new technological infrastructure for financial services,” Zuckerberg elaborated.

Recently, Union Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad had stated that if WhatsApp met regulations of the RBI and the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), then it could be allowed to start digital payment operations in the country.

This June, the RBI had clarified the rules stating that foreign payment firms may process transactions made in India outside the country but the related data should be brought back for local storage within 24 hours.

WhatsApp had also faced an additional hurdle after a Delhi-based think tank called the Centre For Accountability & Systemic Change, alleged in a petition to the Supreme Court in 2018 that the firm was not compliant with payments data localization rules.