08 Dec WhatsApp launches its own “WhatsApp Pay” payment service – initially in India
The functionality has been tested as an MVP (i.e. minimum viable product) since 2018. The start in India makes sense because a) 400 million people in the country already use WhatsApp and b) other alternative payments in the form of cryptocurrencies are generally prohibited. With WhatsApp Pay, money is simply sent on based on accounts like a message. That could massively change the surface of the payment world in the form of data that the customer leaves behind for the brand used. Likewise, derived from this, the downstream systems such as credit cards, bank accounts, financial IT could change in their ownership structure in the medium term, since the customers come from elsewhere. A start date for Europe is not yet known.