WhatsApp Payments: NPCI wants more changes

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which manages the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), has asked popular messaging platform WhatsApp to make additional changes to its data-localisation compliance framework to get final approval to launch payments here, two people aware of the matter said. Deloitte had prepared a third-party audit of WhatsApp’s data compliance, which was submitted to the NPCI, these people added.
For over 18 months now, WhatsApp, which has 400 million monthly active users here, has been operating its payments business on UPI in beta-mode, which is restricted to 1 million users. The exact technical nature of changes asked by the NPCI is not known. This comes after WhatsApp’s global head Will Cathcart had told TOI in July that the messaging platform was compliant and that it is keen to launch payments in India at full scale in 2019.