After its remarkable success in India, the social media giant Facebook has started working on building its WhatsApp payments platform for other countries outside of India. Facebook-owned WhatsApp launched its mobile payments services in India last year in February with its vision money transfer as simple as it is to send a photo.
While addressing at Facebook’s F8 developer conference 2019 that ended yesterday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the company’s new focus on privacy as “a major shift” to run its business. He also said that WhatsApp’s secure payment service that was previously trialed in India is to be rolled out to other countries later this year.
Beta testing for WhatsApp’s peer-to-peer (P2P) payment platform began in February 2018 in India, with the executive stating during Facebook’s F8 developer conference it has 1 million users so far.
WhatsApp’s payment feature will appear in the newer setting menu of the app. Users will have to first verify their number in order to choose a bank/omni-channel from a provided list to process a transaction.
Meanwhile, Zuckerberg also talked about the potential of payments over its platforms during the conference as the company is due to launch money transfers over Messenger in the UK and France, the only two countries avail the service initially.
As of now, Facebook’s CEO has outlined the company’s plans to launch mobile payments on its WhatsApp platform across several countries in 2019, despite the system remaining at the beta phase in its debut market.
