Mobile payment company Paytm, backed by Chinese payments and ecommerce major Alibaba, is planning to launch a messaging service, reports Reuters. The messaging service will, according to the story, be "embedded in its payments app, and allow users to send audio, video, pictures and texts. A fairly big deal is being made out of this: the Wall Street Journal has positioned this as Paytm taking aim at Whatsapp. Remember that Whatsapp's business head Neeraj Arora is on the board of Paytm. Whatsapp is integrating UPI for payments (allowing transfer of money from bank account to bank account), and this might lead to a shift in P2P payments (and not person to merchant payments) away from Paytm, to Whatsapp. This would then be a defensive move from Paytm. Also read: What WhatsApp will have to consider before entering the payments biz in India MediaNama's take: The hype is unwarranted. 1. Whatsapp is in a different league: Whatsapp is in a different league, with over 200 million monthly active users. Globally, a staggering 76% of Whatsapp's 1.3 billion monthly active users users are daily active users. Assuming the same ratio for India, Whatsapp would have 152 million daily active users. Paytm, it is reported, has 225 million users, but these are registered users, and not monthly active users. In the past, Paytm has declined to disclose its monthly active users, whenever MediaNama has enquired. In the month of March, there were only 241 million mobile wallet transactions across the wallet industry - including other…
