Meta Platforms’ attempt to position WhatsApp as a major player in India’s massive fintech sector has largely failed due primarily to regulatory restrictions but also because of the company’s lack of significant product improvements, marketing campaigns, and outreach to merchants, industry leaders and observers claim.
WhatsApp Pay, which saw its user cap lifted in late 2024, handled just 67 million transactions through the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), India’s instant payment system, in June 2025, according to data from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). The figure represents an increase of only 6 million transactions since the cap was removed.
In comparison, Walmart-owned PhonePe and Google Pay added 400 million and 300 million transactions, respectively, during the same period.
“Even after the cap was lifted, WhatsApp didn’t do anything fundamentally different: no big product revamp, no cash-back play, no merchant push, no marketing blitz,” Deepak Abbot, co-founder of gold loan app Indiagold and former senior vice president of products at Indian fintech firm Paytm, told Rest of World in a recent interview. “It’s like they have lost interest.”
Yugal Joshi, a partner at US-based management consulting firm Everest Group, highlighted that WhatsApp’s payment service lacks features and incentives that competitors use to attract and engage users. These include clear transaction tracking, user-facing rewards, robust app interfaces, as well as merchant partnerships.
For Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst and CEO at Greyhound Research, WhatsApp Pay has failed to gain significant traction because the feature entered the market too late, after existing competitors had already built trust, user habits, and brand loyalty.
“It wasn’t simply a matter of delayed access, it was a matter of timing in a fast-moving ecosystem,” Gogia told the outlet. “The platform’s arrival came after critical foundational layers of trust, habit, and brand affinity had already been built by incumbent players.”
WhatsApp began testing payments in India back in 2018 after receiving approval from the Indian government to integrate UPI. With over 200 million daily active users locally, and a rapidly growing digital payments landscape, WhatsApp Pay was primed for success.
However, the messaging platform’ huge reach raised fear it could wide out competitors, leading Indian regulators to quickly step in. They required WhatsApp to store user data in the country and keep it separate from Facebook. They also capped WhatsApp Pay’s user base at just one million.
That cap was gradually raised and eventually lifted last year, but by then, rivals had already cemented their lead. PhonePe was recording more than 8 billion monthly UPI payment transactions by that time, while Google Pay handled 6.2 billion.
Supporting virtual economies
WhatsApp Pay’s stagnation in India mirrors the broader slowdown of Meta’s global payments ambitions. Outside of India, WhatsApp Pay is available only in Brazil where it allows users to send money to peers and pay merchants. In Singapore, the service is limited to payments to registered businesses through a partnership with Stripe. Although there have been discussions about launches in Mexico and Indonesia since at least 2019, nothing has materialized yet.
More broadly, Meta’s fintech strategy has shifted in recent years. Instead of focusing mainly on offering digital payment services in emerging and card-light markets, the company is now seeing payments as one piece of its larger vision for the metaverse and digital economy. It is developing backend tools including wallet interoperability and asset ownership systems, to support this ecosystem.
One key area of focus is stablecoins. Sources told Fortune in May that Meta was in early talks with crypto firms to introduce stablecoins as a way to handle payouts. The discussions remained at a preliminary stage, but they focused on the ability to pay individuals across different regions without the high fees associated with other forms of payments, such as wire transfers.
One executive at a crypto infrastructure provider suggested Meta’s subsidiary Instagram could integrate stablecoins to facilitate small payouts in the range of US$100 to creators in different markets, which would result in lower fees than if paid by fiat currencies.
In January, Meta hired Ginger Baker as its new vice president of product. Baker previously worked as the chief network officer of open banking company Plaid and still serves on the board of the Stellar Development Foundation, a crypto organization that manages a layer 1 blockchain. Baker is now helping guide Meta’s stablecoin explorations, the sources told the media outlet.
Featured image: Edited by Fintech News Singapore, based on images by user31508669 and coffeemill via Freepik
