WhatsApp Poised for Entry into the Indian Market

We all know that the mobile payments market in India has grown by leaps and bounds, especially with the recent Indian cash ban still representing a sock in the snoot for the country.

There have even been some reports of newcomers stepping into the market, and one of the latest comes from WhatsApp, who’s said to be planning a peer-to-peer (P2P) payments system within its messaging app.

India is to be the first country to get access to this technology, and already, Facebook is actively looking for some new people to help head up the venture. It’s looking for someone who knows the Aadhaar biometrics system, as well as someone who knows the Unified Payments Interface and the cross-bank payment app BHIM.

BHIM was launched formally during Narendra Modi’s New Year’s Eve speech, the same one in which he shut down the 500 and 1,000 rupee notes.

Interestingly, WhatsApp doesn’t have an office in India as it is, reports note, but it does have a substantial user base in the region. It has around 200 million active users every month, and given that’s out of 340 million smartphone users in the country, WhatsApp is a major force in messaging, and should have a very fertile market to launch a mobile payments system into.

The problem, of course, is that WhatsApp will be walking into a very contentious market. Already, several mobile payment and mobile wallet apps are operating in the Indian market, so getting users away from them might be more of a challenge than WhatsApp wanted to take on.

The good news, though, is that this competition may not be that pronounced after all. Since WhatsApp already has a hand in the country, getting users to migrate from whatever platform they have now to a platform they’re already using—albeit for something different—may be a comparatively different concept. Plus, this may be just the thing the various small businesses in the country need to move into an increasingly post-cash era.

Will WhatsApp’s current status in India be enough leverage to give it a slice of the mobile payments market? It’s a safe bet that it will be the case, especially given that this is P2P rather than business to consumer.