It’s been a long time since we heard about WhatsApp planning to introduce its payments service. Now, the company has revealed that the service will be launched by the end of this year.
A couple of years back, in 2017, the company had started testing the payments service in India through invite-only model. Although it’s been over two years since that testing started, the company is yet to officially launch the service in India.
The service didn’t launch earlier despite testing it with around 1 million users because of the newly introduced privacy-related regulations by the Indian government.
New information about the service getting launched by the end of this year comes a couple of months after it was reported that WhatsApp is close to officially unveil its peer-to-peer payments service in India, the company’s largest market.
Abhijit Bose, WhatsApp India head has revealed this new information during an interview with The Economic Times. He said: “We hope to offer the service by the end of the year”.
WhatsApp is planning to integrate the payment system with its WhatsApp for Business application and is aiming to enable “end-to-end communication cycle” between the customers and small business using the app.
He has also revealed that why the company decided to make the WhatsApp Business API a paid service in comparison to making the app free. He stated that Business API is a separate product and is meant for medium and large businesses that communicate with their customers all across the world.
