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 as part of the messaging service did not contain payments data. The affidavit shows that the RBI and NPCI were constantly monitoring WhatsApp's compliance with the regular's data storage norms for its payments' business from April 2018 onward. While other third-party players were able to design their UPI apps and data practices in full compliance with the RBI's circular in the following months, WhatsApp took much longer. The NPCI finally gave the green-light to WhatsApp and its sponsor bank ICICI Bank to go-live with its UPI service in June 2020, and in November it permitted WhatsApp Pay to commercially launch albeit, with some restrictions. MediaNama sent queries to ICICI Bank…
