, Columnist
Zuckerberg's Indian Payments Roulette Bet
Transactions are the way into content, commerce and financial services.
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After lobbying in vain for his silly and controversial idea of a basic internet for people too poor to pay for data, Mark Zuckerberg is finally doing something useful in India. The Facebook Inc. boss is bringing a much-awaited payments feature to the country's 250 million WhatsApp users.
In anticipation of this move, commentators had already predicted a "WhatsApp moment" in banking, whereby technology disrupts the cash-heavy, inefficient methods by which people currently settle dues in developing countries. Zuckerberg's thunder, however, was stolen by Sundar Pichai. Google Tez, which launched in India last September, had 12 million customers by the end of the year and had processed 140 million transactions.