Manesh Mahatme, head of WhatsApp pay India, exits the company

23 Sep 2022 , 07:57 AM

Manesh Mahatme, director and head of WhatsApp Pay in India, left the business earlier this month after working there for roughly 18 months.

In April 2021, WhatsApp hired Mahatme, a former director and board member of Amazon Pay India, to lead its payments division. As director of WhatsApp Pay, he concentrated on growing the business and improving the user experience with payments.

A report claimed that he is anticipated to return to his former company Amazon India in a strategic capacity.

ET received confirmation from a Meta representative that Mahatme has departed WhatsApp Pay.

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which manages the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), awarded WhatsApp permission to launch on the platform gradually in November 2020, starting with a maximum of 20 million users.

By the end of 2021, NPCI doubled this cap to 40 million, and by April 2022, it was raised to 100 million.

Despite the growth, WhatsApp Pay still only accounts for a pitiful fraction of all UPI transactions. Despite launching successive cashback campaigns in April and June, which led to a slight increase in numbers, it had a share of less than 1% of the overall UPI market in August, with only 6.72 million transactions. In August, there were 6.5 billion UPI transactions in total.

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