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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Creating a fair digital payments market -Padmashree Gehl Sampath

Creating a fair digital payments market -Padmashree Gehl Sampath

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published Published on Jul 16, 2019   modified Modified on Jul 16, 2019
-The Hindu

Local firms will be at a disadvantage if big tech companies are given plum roles

Since early last year, WhatsApp has busily piloted its payment system in India. WhatsApp Pay relies on the Indian government’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) system to facilitate inter-bank transactions. Regulatory approval that would allow its nation-wide introduction is stuck on one point: the Indian government has asked WhatsApp to localise all data processing related to payment transactions in India and not on Facebook’s servers in the U.S. This is well in line with the government’s existing technology vision for the digital economy, which hinges on data localisation as the magic bullet to solve multiple problems ranging from prevention of personal data misuse to promotion of local enterprises. Unfortunately, it misses a number of other issues and hidden costs of this current deal and raises broader issues on big tech’s foray into financial services, especially payments.

The case of WhatsApp Pay

In the case of WhatsApp Pay, its parent company, Facebook, has come under scrutiny for harmful content, lack of privacy, and data misuse in recent years. The large amounts of social media data that Facebook sits on, its habit of using private user data to promote business, and its reluctance to adhere to policy have led to radical suggestions of breaking up big tech. Facebook, in response, has rolled out a new plan to reinvent its business, which is to build a new privacy-focused platform that integrates WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger. This will provide end-to-end encryption for consumers and business services along with direct payment options. As The Economist recently noted, if this succeeds, it would make it more difficult to argue for big tech to be sliced up.

The only hitch in this new business plan is that Facebook is relatively new to the digital payments market and cannot gain a foothold in the U.S., where PayPal has the largest consumer base. This is where it becomes important to make WhatsApp Pay successful in India. India is WhatsApp’s largest market in the world with over 250 million monthly users. Once WhatsApp Pay catches on in India, Facebook intends to introduce it in other developing countries. Thus, the decision to allow WhatsApp Pay in India can catapult Facebook into the big league in the global digital payments market where companies like Alibaba’s Alipay and Tencent’s WeChat are making waves.

India’s digital vision talks about data sovereignty and giving domestic firms an advantage. The digital payments market, with 800 million mobile users in the country of which more than 430 million have Internet access, is estimated to grow to over $1 trillion by 2025. If India is serious about giving local firms an advantage, it should leverage this immense opportunity. With the right policy incentives, local firms could capture large shares of the digital payments market to become e-commerce players on a global scale, as China’s experience shows. In China, domestic enterprises were strategically enabled to use the local market to emerge as global champions. Today, WeChat combines the functional features of several online platforms including Facebook, WhatsApp, PayPal and Uber Eats. Over 300 million users worldwide use WeChat payments for everything, right from ordering food to paying hospital bills, a model that all firms want to emulate.

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The Hindu, 16 July, 2019, https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/creating-a-fair-digital-payments-market/article28448617.ece?homepage=true


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