Facebook-owned Whatsapp and its mobile payment have yet to reach its existing 200 million user base in India. This service, which first launched in beta mode for over 1 million users has failed to attain the required licensing permissions from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).
And for the first time, the RBI has officially commented on the issue, which has been reported in this Times of India report. The federal reserve body has been quoted saying WhatsApp still doesn’t comply with its recent storage localisation norms for payment companies.
This is the same regulation, which required all global payment firms, including the likes of MasterCard and Visa from earlier this year.
The recent RBI regulations mandated all payment service providers and third party payment apps to store all their data only in India. And according to the affidavit, mentioned in the report filed with the SC, WhatsApp has been only mirroring its users’ data from India, and not exactly storing it in the country.
This is a big reason behind the delay in launch of WhatsApp Pay, which is another payment service built over the country’s Unified Payment Interface (UPI) ecosystem. This is the same platform on which Google Pay, Xiaomi’s Mi Pay and even Paytm offers its bank-to-bank inter-operable payment service to consumers.
WhatsApp will be hoping that its recently appointed country head, Abhijit Bose could speed up the process of getting the approval to launch its payment service pan India.
And if the non-compliance of RBI regulations wasn’t enough, WhatsApp has repeatedly been scrutinised by the country’s government, over its failure to tackle the menace of fake news, spread through its platform.
Off late, we have seen WhatsApp proactively bringing features and initiatives to prevent such mishaps from happening, especially with the Indian Elections around the corner.
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)