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Despite having 500 million users in India, WhatsApp has been unable to crack the country’s $3 trillion fintech market. The market is now dominated by Walmart-owned PhonePe, and Google.
Indian regulators quickly stepped in, insisting WhatsApp store user data in the country and keep it separate from Facebook. The regulators also capped WhatsApp Pay’s user base at just 1 million. The cap was gradually raised and then entirely lifted in December 2024. But rivals had cemented their leads by then. “Even after the cap was lifted, WhatsApp didn’t do anything fundamentally different — no big product revamp, no cash-back play, no merchant push, no marketing blitz. It’s like they have lost interest,” Deepak Abbot, co-founder of gold loan app Indiagold and former senior vice president of products at Indian fintech firm Paytm, told Rest of World.
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