WhatsApp's payment service could reportedly debut very soon in the country

WhatsApp has been operating its payment service as a closed beta for well over a year and it has faced a lot of regulatory hurdles from the NPCI. Now it appears that that the company is preparing a report to submit to the Reserve Bank of India for approval which would make the payments service mainstream. [caption id=“attachment_6017851” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] Representative Image[/caption] As per a Bloomberg report, India’s digital payments sector is likely to increase “five-fold” by 2023 and hit the $1 trillion mark. WhatsApp’s largest market is in India with over 300 million users. A payment mechanism for sending and receiving money on the platform would be enormous. The report states that “WhatsApp is required to show a third-party auditor that all data involved in payments will be stored on servers only in India.” WhatsApp has reportedly declined to comment on the situation of an audit. According to the guidelines of RBI, the company has to set up its data storage facilities in the country first, then go through the auditing process where the auditors are enrolled from  Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, CERT-IN. WhatsApp launched its payment feature with ICICI bank but failed due to a lack of localisation of data storage back in April. A spokesperson told Economic Times that it is different this time and the flaw of localisation of data has been addressed.