WhatsApp doubles down on P2P payments in India

The Meta-owned messaging platform said it will offer cashback rewards for Indian consumers who make peer-to-peer payments on the app. It will also look into similar rewards for merchant payments.

Why should we care?
Meta’s decision to use incentives as an opportunity to grow its user base signals the size of the market at stake. WhatsApp is squaring off against Google Pay, Paytm, and PhonePe within the P2P payments space. But the development also highlights what India’s regulators are thinking and feeling. Just two weeks ago, WhatsApp was approved to more than double the audience of its payments services in India to 100 million users. Regulators had previously expressed concerns about a quick push, which they thought might strain financial infrastructure in the country through rapid digitization. The green flag given to WhatsApp suggests India’s regulators think the country can handle a larger and more crowded payments space, especially given major use of its Unified Payments Interface (UPI) system. WhatsApp’s investments in payments are also part of a larger effort by Meta to monetize its users across platforms—from Facebook to the metaverse—in the face of stagnant, often negative, audience growth.