Kunal Shah argues WhatsApp Pay must reach 100 million active monthly users by mid-2025 to justify Meta's strategic push in India. This assessment lands as WhatsApp, despite its vast user base, continues to lag significantly in UPI market share. For PhonePe and Google Pay, this implies a longer period to solidify their duopoly without a strong third contender.
How We Got Here
Meta first launched WhatsApp Pay in India in November 2020 after a prolonged regulatory approval process with NPCI. Despite WhatsApp having over 500 million Indian users, its UPI transaction share remained below 0.1% in December 2023.
The Numbers
- Kunal Shah believes Meta's pure UPI play overlooks the potential of leveraging WhatsApp's chat graph for contextual commerce and payments.
- The article cites a reported internal Meta target of 50 million monthly active WhatsApp Pay users by early 2024, which sources suggest has been missed.
- WhatsApp's current monthly active users for payments are estimated at around 15 million, a fraction of competitors like PhonePe's 200 million.
- Shah highlighted the absence of robust merchant-side tools or embedded, chat-first commerce features as a critical gap for WhatsApp in India.
What Happens Next
🇮🇳 Why This Matters for India
For small business owners in cities like Indore and Visakhapatnam, a successful WhatsApp commerce ecosystem could offer a direct, zero-MDR sales channel, bypassing traditional aggregators.
The Take
What's being missed is that WhatsApp's real power is its social graph, not just its payment rails. Meta needs to build embedded commerce within chats to truly compete, rather than just offering a payment button.
Source:
Inc42 ↗