Andy Mukherjee, Columnist

WhatsApp Gets a Raw Deal in Payments

‘Fake news’ stigma is locking out Facebook’s messaging app from India’s huge digital transfers market.

June 6, 2020 at 12:00 AM UTC

Andy Mukherjee is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering industrial companies and financial services in Asia. Previously, he worked for Reuters, the Straits Times and Bloomberg News.

WhatsApp runs into a major roadblock in India.
Photographer: Avishek Das/SOPA/Light Rocket/Getty

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Money is many things, but it’s not fake news. So why block WhatsApp from spreading it around?

India is the laboratory of choice for Western tech firms to test out their mobile payment capabilities so they can be rolled out from Bangladesh to Nigeria. Facebook Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg entered the fray two years ago by enabling the popular messaging service WhatsApp to send and receive money in India. But the beta version, limited to 1 million users, keeps getting blocked from becoming a full-fledged service.