WhatsApp Pay is the biggest tech product failure in India: BharatPe founder Ashneer Grover

Commenting on the resignation of
WhatsApp India head Abhijit Bose, who quit Meta on Tuesday after a four-year stint as the head of its messaging service in India, Grover tweeted: “WhatsApp Pay has to be the biggest failure in India as a tech product. Everyone has @WhatsApp on their phone — sending money on WA using UPI is as easy as sending pic. It should have beaten @Paytm @PhonePe @GooglePay. Country managers can’t win you markets ! good riddance now ! (sic)” Grover tweeted.

Tweeting in Hindi, Grover mocked WhatsApp’s advertising campaign, saying, “Company should have instead advertised WhatsApp Pay.”

Bose was roped in to drive
Whatsapp’s payments business as well as to expand the messaging app’s reach in India. However, WhatsApp India has struggled to make any progress on the payments side with the Unified Payments Interface (UPI). Along with Bose, Facebook’s public policy director Rajiv Aggarwal has also quit the company.

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National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) data show that PhonePe had the
highest share in total UPI transactions in India, at 49%, in October.

PhonePe was followed by Google Pay with a 34% share, Paytm (11%), CRED Pay (1.8%) and others (WhatsApp, Amazon Pay and banking apps) with a 3.5% share.

Grover, a former ‘Shark Tank India’ reality show judge, has announced that his autobiography will be out in December. Titled
Doglapan: The Hard Truth about Life and Start-ups, the book is being published by Penguin India.