WhatsApp looks at lending after payments nod

BENGALURU: WhatsApp is looking at lending to its customers in India, according to one of its objectives of operations listed in its memorandum of association (MoA) in a regulatory filing of its local entity last month. The filings of WhatsApp Application Services showed this would potentially be explored through partnerships with banks because it said it won’t undertake any banking business according to the law. The regulatory documents were sourced from Tofler, a business intelligence platform. The development comes as WhatsApp’s payments business is expected to get a green light in the coming months. The Facebook-owned company also entered into a partnership with Reliance Retail last month for an online-to-offline (O2O) commerce play, which is likely to boost usage of WhatsApp Business — a separate app for small merchants. This platform had over a million such users as of last year. The commerce partnership between Jio and WhatsApp has been started in Mumbai suburbs already. “To advance money or give credit on such terms as may seem expedient, and with or without security, to customers and others,” the filing said. Industry sources had told TOI last year that the company had looked at lending “seriously enough”. But it was waiting for a final nod on its payments services on the UPI platform from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). This would include small loans for the merchants using WhatsApp for their businesses. According to sources, regulators have not received any new communication from WhatsApp following the Reliance and Facebook deal last week. “Things should accelerate now but they (WhatsApp) are yet to achieve 100% data-localisation compliance,” a person aware of the matter said. Before the virus outbreak in India, NPCI was actively thinking of allowing WhatsApp to gradually roll out its payments services to 10 million users, up from its current base of 1 million, as TOI had reported in February. Separately, there is a court proceeding under way in the Supreme Court which challenged WhatsApp’s data-localisation compliance. While the RBI said in November last year that WhatsApp wasn’t compliant, it was expected the central bank would update its stance when the matter was supposed to be heard this month. But the virus outbreak has postponed the same. WhatsApp had submitted a revised proposal to NPCI in January. The filings also showed WhatsApp’s Indian entity has increased its authorised share capital to Rs 1.6 crore from Rs 10 lakh earlier. This is typically an indication of more capital coming into a firm. An email sent to the WhatsApp India spokesperson did not elicit any response on the matter. Globally, tech majors like Google are entering the financial services space by offering customers the ability to check their account balances, while Apple launched a credit card with Goldman Sachs.

from Economic Times https://ift.tt/2yVHWm0