With Jio, WhatsApp Pay to empower millions of Indians, says Mark Zuckerberg

NEW DELHI: Reiterating his commitment to launch WhatsApp Pay for over 400 million users of the messaging platform in India, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the Reliance Jio partnership is a huge opportunity to enable small businesses and individuals in the country to buy and sell things through WhatsApp.

Talking to analysts during an earnings call on Thursday, Zuckerberg said that a lot of people use WhatsApp, especially in India.

"We want to enable that. That starts with enabling payments. A big part of the partnership that we have with Jio will be to wire up and get thousands of small businesses across India on-boarded onto WhatsApp, to do commerce there," the Facebook CEO emphasised. Facebook-owned WhatsApp has been testing its payments platform in India for quite some time now but has not been successfully in launching it owing to regulatory hurdles.

Reliance Industries (RIL) Chairman Mukesh Ambani said this month that the new commerce platform JioMart and Whatsapp will be working closely to create growth opportunities for millions of Indian small merchants and kirana shops.

"Over 400 million WhatsApp users in India bring unique value to our partnership," Ambani said at the company's first annual general meeting. Zuckerberg said that they are really excited about the opportunity in India. "Once we prove that out with Jio in India, we're planning on expanding it to more folks in India and to other countries as well. But, there's no doubt that India is a huge opportunity," he told the analysts. (IANS)

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