WhatsApp has launched its payment platform ‘WhatsApp Pay’ in Brazil, two years after it began testing the service in India with an unsuccessful launch.
The move comes as parent company Facebook pushes ahead with plans to bring more e-commerce to its platforms.
WhatsApp Pay allows users to send money to one another for free or make purchases from small businesses.
In 2018, the Facebook-owned company had started testing the service in India.
However, the firm’s efforts to launch WhatsApp Pay in India have been held up for two years by regulators.
In a Facebook post on Monday, its CEO Mark Zuckerberg has now said Brazil is the first country where it is widely rolling out the payment platform.
He said;
Today we are starting to launch payments for people using WhatsApp in Brazil. We are making sending and receiving money as easy as sharing photos.
Zuckerberg added that small businesses will also be able to make sales right within WhatsApp, stressing that;
To do this, we are building on Facebook Pay, which provides a secure and consistent way to make payments across our apps.
He said WhatsApp is working with Brazil local banks, including Banco do Brasil, Nubank, Sicredi as well as Cielo, the leading payments processor for merchants in the country.
On its blog, WhatsApp highlighted that the launch is part of a wider digital payment strategy across all of Facebook‘s platforms.
The chatting social media platform stressed;
Payments on WhatsApp are enabled by Facebook Pay, in the future we want to make it possible for people and businesses to use the same card information across Facebook’s family of apps.
While person-to-person payments will be free small businesses will have to pay a processing fee to receive customer payments.
It stated that it built payments with security in mind and a special six digit PIN or fingerprint will be required to prevent unauthorised transactions.
WhatsApp added;
To start, we will support debit or credit cards from Banco do Brasil, Nubank, and Sicredi on the Visa and Mastercard networks -and we are working with Cielo, the leading payments processor in Brazil. We have built an open model to welcome more partners in the future.
WhatsApp has 120m users in Brazil, making the country its second-largest market after India, where it has 400m users.
