There has been a bit of an uproar in the Indian digital payments industry with WhatsApp announcing their entry into the market. This industry is largely dependent on large scale of operations. You need a large volume in terms of user participation and an equally large userbase to propel this growth.
WhatsApp has the numbers and apparently it can do a great job out of it's payment system as well from the initial reports coming in. WhatsApp has rolled out its payments features to select users pan-India. Facebook has the messenger payments feature in the US but in India digital wallets and digital transactions is the next big game in improving banking needs of over a billion people.
PayTM-top Indian payments platform CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma cried foul over it's launch in the market. “Facebook is openly colonising our payment system and is customising UPI to their benefit. UPI was built as an India Stack; now some American monopoly arm-twists UPI for customer implementation,” said Sharma to the Economic Times publication.
Most of these companies are threatened by this new roll-out of features from the most used messaging app in India. Whastapp is used by nearly everyone with a smartphone and data connection in India. If you could connect your bank account to whatsapp and send/receive payments, you could simplify banking to a large extent as well as scale. It makes it a lot easier to transact with just about anyone.
Revolutionising payments with Cryptocurrencies or tokens
WhatsApp probably still remains one of the largest acquisitions for Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg even hinted that they are considering use of blockchain, and are trying to understand cryptocurrencies and their use cases around Facebook. Will there be a Facebook tokens a couple of years from now, who knows?
But if WhatsApp were to start one then the chances of mass adoption of crypto-tokens are very high. ICICI Bank is one of the top private sector banks in India. In the past ICICI has used blockchain technology for remittances. Infact it was the first bank in India to test blockchain for payments. They are currently the sole banking partner for WhatsApp's beta stage of it's payments roll-out plan.
To understand the importance of user experience and brand recall in payments, it is important to bring in some context to the Unified Payments Interface, which was launched in August 2016 by then Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan. Initially, there were only 21 banks on the UPI protocol. This January, that number was at 71. UPI transactions have vaulted from about 2 million in December 2016 to a staggering 151.8 million in January. - ET
Given these large numbers of transactions and familiarity of Indian smartphone users with WhatsApp, it's likely that a token based off on WhatsApp would work very well. This is just an hypothetical situation currently but imagine if Telegram were to release a token which could be used to make real-time payments to anyone else on the network. It would make life so much easier.
WhatsApp is the favorite DM apps for majority of Indian users. Infact WhatsApp has a huge userbase globally as well. In India many bankers are viewing cash as their enemy and this change in mindset is driven by government initiatives towards a 'digital India' where payments are made solely through electronic means.
WhatsApp payments with or without crypto tokens are likely to push towards taking this digital India dream closer to reality.
Do you think it would be a good idea for Facebook Messenger payments / WhatsApp payments to create tokens of their own or simply integrate with FIAT and limit themselves to just that?
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