A plea has been filed in Supreme Court saying until WhatsApp appoints a grievance officer, it should not be allowed to begin its payments service.
New Delhi: The Supreme Court has issued notices to WhatsApp and the central government on a plea seeking directions to the messaging app to stop its payment systems.
The new feature — ‘In-Chat Payment’ — allows users to make payments to anyone from their WhatsApp contact list. It can be used to send and receive money.
According to the petition by Centre for Accountability and Systemic Change, until WhatsApp appoints a grievance officer as per Indian laws, it should not be allowed to begin its payments service in the country.
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As of now, WhatsApp has 20 crore Indian users but it does not provide them with the necessary grievance redressal mechanism. It is also doing trials of its payments service with 10 lakh users.
Earlier, Google and Facebook appointed grievance officers following a Delhi High Court order in August 2013.
Trials launched in February
The first signs of WhatsApp’s In-Chat payment service were seen in February 2018. It was a beta version and available to almost a million Indians.
According to bankbazaar.com, the feature will be compatible with the unified payments interface (UPI). This means fund transfers can take place without having to furnish a bank account number and an IFSC code.
It supports payments from several banks such as Axis Bank, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, State Bank of India, Yes Bank and Airtel Payments Bank.
The UPI interface allows users make fund transfers using a virtual payment address (VPA). The process is considered fast, convenient and is accessible on a 24×7 basis though the year.
UPI was developed by National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), an initiative of Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and Indian Banks’ Association (IBA).
How it works
A user has to first click the ‘rupee’ symbol under ‘attachment’ option in the In-Chat Payment service. Next, a transaction amount and the UPI PIN must be entered. A main advantage of this payment system, according to bankbazaar.com, is that users need not opt out of the chat window to transfer money.
Other features and benefits include the ability to make a transfer to anyone on your WhatsApp contact list. It is similar to sending a photo or a message on WhatsApp, and that the payee/beneficiary receives a notification within the chat window once a fund transfer has been completed.
The messaging app has also launched a separate app, WhatsApp Business, targeting small business owners to communicate with customers.
Other competing payment services
The initial reactions to WhatsApp’s payment service appear to be positive. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook that owns WhatsApp, said after the company’s results on 25 July: “We’ve been testing payments on WhatsApp in India. It gives people a really simple way to send money to each other and contributes to greater financial inclusion. Of the people who have tested this, feedback and usage have been very strong. All signs point to a lot of people wanting to use this when the government gives us the green light.”
Also read: Appoint grievance officer for WhatsApp, think tank urges Supreme Court
WhatsApp’s In-Chat Payment system can face competitions from payment wallets such as Paytm, Mobikwik and PayU besides Google Tez and BHIM app. However, unlike most payment wallets, WhatsApp does not require additional log-in; nor does it require Aadhaar-based processing to access the payment service. All this has, however, led to a controversy.
Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma tweeted that WhatsApp is appropriating the UPI to create a closed loop by allowing only WhatsApp users to make payments to each other. He feared this would go against the main objective of UPI which was to make payments inter-operable and accessible to any and all financial channels using the UPI platform (for example, ability to send funds from Google Tez to another payment service which is UPI-compatible).
After failing to win war against India’s open internet with cheap tricks of free basics, Facebook is again in play.
Killing beautiful open UPI system with its custom close garden implementation.
I am surprised, champions of open @India_Stack , let it happen ! https://t.co/wIsNuF1AiB— Vijay Shekhar (@vijayshekhar) February 14, 2018
However, according to an Economic Times report, now WhatsApp claims that other payment services, including that of Google’s, are getting an unfair advantage from India’s regulatory regime and that WhatsApp may look to other countries for a full-scale rollout of the feature.
(Disclosure: Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma is an investor in ThePrint.)
I think it’s not safe anymore. you can use another application or the official application for this work.
you can read further details on https://indiaagainstcorruption.org/up-ration-card/