WhatsApp India has hired Manesh Mahatme, a senior executive with Amazon Pay India, to lead its payments vertical, Reuters reported citing unnamed sources. Mahatme has been with Amazon Pay for nearly 7 years as its head of business, product and technology, according to his LinkedIn profile. Back in August 2020, WhatsApp published a job post on Facebook stating that it was looking for a director to head its payments operations in India. This person would report to Abhijit Bose, the head of WhatsApp India, and would be responsible for developing WhatsApp’s long-term strategy for payments. WhatsApp has nearly 500 million users in India, which makes the country the biggest market for the end-to-end encryption messaging service. MediaNama reached out to WhatsApp and Amazon Pay India for comments. Their responses will be added once received. The roll-out WhatsApp's payment service, on the Unified Payment Interface, was delayed for over two years due to regulatory concerns related to the Reserve Bank of India's data localisation norms. It has also faced legal challenges in the courts over its payment service roll-out and data collection methods. MediaNama reported that WhatsApp was ready to go-live with its UPI service in November 2019 but the RBI intervened and asked the National Payments Corporation of India 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. It was only in November 2020, that WhatsApp got the green light from the NPCI to roll-out…
