It took WhatsApp nearly three years to roll out its Unified Payments Interface (UPI) service in India as the Facebook-owned platform faced hurdles in complying with the Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) data localisation norms, according to an affidavit filed by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) in the Supreme Court. MediaNama has seen a copy of the affidavit. Email correspondence between the RBI, NPCI and WhatsApp, reveals that WhatsApp was ready to go-live with its UPI service in November 2019 but the RBI intervened and asked the NPCI to conduct more checks and ensure specific data was not being stored by the company abroad. This led to delays in WhatsApp Pay's roll-out. The RBI specificially asked the NPCI to ensure that five specific data fields were not being stored by WhatsApp and that data the company stored abroad…
