Facebook Starts Digital Payments In India With Beta Version Of Recharge On Messenger

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SUMMARY

In The Last Few Months, The Social Media Giant Has Forayed Into Multiple Sectors Including Business, Marketplace And Payments

Amid news pertaining to the Facebook data leak, non-users’ data tracking and Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony in the US Congress, the social media giant has been working on a host of add-on features, especially for its Indian users.

Besides, Facebook marketplace and Facebook Business, the company has now also entered the digital payments space with Facebook messenger set to have the payments feature. As with WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger will also reportedly allow peer-to-peer payments.

In its FAQ, WhatsApp has recently issued a clarification that the invoice and messaging platform is using Facebook’s payments infrastructure to process the same. However, Facebook Messenger payments will be completely independent of Facebook’s WhatsApp’ Payments.

Both, Facebook Payments and WhatsApp Payments are currently being run in beta mode, with Facebook offering Mobile recharge option to kickstart. Facebook has already launched its payments feature in some other countries like the UK and France.

As, has been the case with Freecharge, Mobikwik, Paytm, Phonepe and many other digital payments wallets, mobile recharge is one of the few tried and tested methods to increase the digital payments traffic and number of transactions. However, being in beta, the mobile recharge facility on Facebook is still not available for every user.

Facebook To Comply With EU’s GDPR

Amid increasing Bitcoin crimes, data theft and people’s privacy are constantly under threat, as the European Union has decided to enforce new General Data Protection Regulation from May 25, 2018, onwards, Facebook has announced plans to introduce new privacy experience, taking new measures to comply with the GDPR.

In a statement, Facebook has now stated that everyone – no matter where they live – will be asked to review important information about how Facebook uses data and makes choices about their privacy on Facebook. The company will begin by rolling these choices out in Europe this week.

The company has also promised that Facebook users will be even allowed to choose ads based on data from partners. Users now will have increased control over their profile data and its privacy, says the company statement.

After China, India is the next destination for digital payments companies. Facebook India with over 270 Mn users is surely up for the digital payments space and even mobile recharge transactions by its users will help it grab a significant share in the space. However, Facebook, having been heavily criticised for abusing the data privacy world over, can’t take the Indian market for granted anymore, as its subsidiary WhatsApp recently made headlines for sharing its payments data with third parties like Facebook.

Update 1: April 20, 2018 (10.00 AM)

A Facebook spokesperson later clarified that Facebook has still no plans to introduce Facebook payments in India. As per the reports, “Mobile recharge option is a Facebook ‘Marketplace’ offering – which is actually going on as a pilot test which is right now available to only Android users in some regions. However, there are currently no tests planned for recharges or peer-to-peer payments on Messenger in India.”