WhatsApp may take up five months in a bid to comply with data localisation rules in India and go live.
The popular instant messaging service is willing to unveil its payments service in the country for a long time but unable to do so owing to non-compliance of data localisation policies.
As of now, WhatsApp is allowed to run beta-test of its payments product within a limited user base of 10 lakh. It is permitted to perform only small value transactions by the National Payments Corporation of India, the government entity supervising the operations of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI).
Official figures pertaining to the exact number of users of the pilot platform is unavailable, however, the number may fall in the range of 7 lakh as per the industry sources. The Facebook-owned WhatsApp uses UPI for enabling payments in India.
According to the Reserve Bank of India‘s latest guidelines, payments data is mandated to be stored within the country and all companies in the digital payments segment will have to get a third-party audit done by CERT-IN empanelled auditors. CERT-IN is the national nodal agency for responding to computer security incidents as and when they occur.
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