Leadership Exodus Continues At Meta India, WhatsApp Pay Head Quits Within 4 Months

The leadership exodus continues at Meta India as WhatsApp Pay’s India head Vinay Choletti has resigned within four months of being promoted to the position.

In September, Manesh Mahatme, who was then WhatsApp Pay’s India head, had quit the company to join Amazon.

In a LinkedIn post, Choletti said that Tuesday (December 13) was his last day at WhatsApp Pay.

“Today was my last day at WhatsApp Pay and as I sign off, I can proudly say that watching the scale and the influence of WhatsApp in India has been a humbling experience. The last one year personally has been a great learning journey and the excitement of being in the frontline and launching some global first payments use cases such as “QR tickets for Bangalore Metro on WhatsApp” was unmatched,” said Choletti.

After a long stint with Amazon and other international companies, Choletti joined WhatsApp Pay India in October last year. After heading the merchant payments vertical in the company for over a year, he was promoted to the position of WhatsApp Pay India head in September after Mahatme’s resignation.

“I am humbled to see the customer adoption of novel use cases using WhatsApp Pay and I will wear these badges proudly for the rest of my life,” Choletti said in his social media post.

“As I move on to my next adventure, I strongly believe that WhatsApp has the power to phenomenally transform digital payments and financial inclusion in India and I look forward to seeing it leverage its potential in the coming years,” he added.

Meta India wasn’t immediately available to respond to Inc42’s query on the matter.

In November this year, WhatsApp’s India head Abhijit Bose and Meta’s India public policy director Rajiv Aggarwal also resigned. Their exits were followed by the resignation of Ajit Mohan, head of Meta India. 

The leadership exodus at Meta India has coincided with the company’s plans to cut its global workforce by 13%, impacting over 11,000 employees. However, Meta earlier said that the resignations of its top executives in India were unrelated to the restructuring plans.

The year 2022 has been a difficult one for Meta due to various internal issues, valuation loss, falling revenue, controversies around data security and data breach, among others

WhatsApp is eyeing a large market share in the fast-growing United Payments Interface (UPI) ecosystem in India. WhatsApp Pay emerged as the biggest gainer in terms of the month-on-month rise in UPI transaction value for the second consecutive month in November. 

WhatsApp Pay’s UPI transaction value rose 8.6% to INR 769.29 Cr in November from INR 708.56 Cr in October. However, it currently has a miniscule share in the UPI market, which is dominated by PhonePe, Google Pay and Paytm. 

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