WhatsApp Pay India Chief Manesh Mahatme Quits

Manesh Mahatme has quit as the chief of WhatsApp Pay in India. He reportedly plans to join his former employer and ecommerce major Amazon.

A source privy to the development told Moneycontrol that Mahatme quit WhatsApp Pay after close to an 18-month stint. His LinkedIn profile confirms that he left the Meta-owned communication app’s payments business in India in September 2022. 

Confirming the announcement, a Meta spokesperson said, “Manesh has played an important role in expanding the access to ‘payments on WhatsApp’ in India, and we wish him every success for his future endeavours.”

A source told the Economic Times that Mahatme is expected to rejoin Amazon India in a strategic role. Before joining WhatsApp India, Mahatme served as the director of Amazon Pay India for nearly 7 years.

Mahatme’s departure comes at a time when WhatsApp Pay has received a lukewarm response to its services in India. Despite being the country’s largest instant messaging app with an estimated 487 Mn users, the platform has been bogged down by government mandates that have limited the number of users that it can onboard.

As per the latest data, WhatsApp Pay has been permitted to extend its digital payment services to 100 Mn users, a far cry from its mammoth customer base. At the outset, this number was just 20 Mn in 2020 which was subsequently increased to 40 Mn last year as authorities relaxed norms.

While the platform had hoped for a smooth sailing, it has spent a greater part of the past few years complying with norms just to scale its miniscule operations. It is pertinent to note that WhatsApp began work on the service as early as 2017 and ran pilots in the country in early 2018.

Back To Square One

Despite the hiccups, WhatsApp Pay has doubled down on its India strategy but to no avail. In the last one year, it has introduced a slew of features to aid discoverability of the payments service and has also mounted a mega marketing campaign to woo users. 

Offering cashbacks too appears to have failed. While transactions did increase in the immediate aftermath of the announcement in July this year, the volume again fell again in August this year.

Earlier this month, WhatsApp also announced a partnership with Reliance to provide an end-to-end shopping experience for JioMart customers, including deploying WhatsApp Pay for payments. 

WhatsApp Pay has failed to make any major dent in its competitors’ user base. Both Walmart-owned PhonePe and Google Pay accounted for 81% of the transaction count and 84% of the transaction value in August 2022. 

The curbs on WhatsApp Pay’s user base is part of a larger problem faced by regulators overlooking the space. The government appears to have learnt its lessons as both Google Pay and PhonePe together have built somewhat of a duopoly in the UPI market in the country.

To reign in the repetition of the same issue with WhatsApp, Centre has come out with Third Party Application Providers (TPAP) guidelines that propose to limit the market cap to 30% per player.