India is considered WhatsApp’s largest market, with many Indians using WhatsApp as their primary communication tool and hundreds of millions of monthly active users. Despite the app’s immense popularity in the market, it has faced significant regulatory challenges from the Indian government, with a Delhi High Court mandating traceability (resulting in the breaking of WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption) in April 2024, followed by a five-year ban on sharing information collected from WhatsApp by India’s Competition Commission in November 2024.
Despite these regulatory challenges, WhatsApp received approval from India’s National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) in December 2024 to extend its UPI services through WhatsApp Pay to its entire Indian user base. The NPCI, which oversees the country’s retail payments and settlement infrastructure, granted this permission, marking a significant expansion for WhatsApp Pay in its largest market.
This ruling speaks to the importance of WhatsApp’s role in Indian digitalization but also highlights the increasing footprint, and therefore, a potentially Meta-branded super app, within India.
The Indian digital payments landscape
In 2016, the NPCI introduced the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), a real-time, instant payment system that facilitates both peer-to-peer and merchant transactions. UPI’s core strength in enabling intermediate funds transfers through a phone number or UPI ID, along with its ability to integrate with third-party applications, has made it the de-facto backbone of all digital payments in India. UPI is also playing a significant role in the implementation of India’s digital rupee central bank digital currency (CBDC), highlighting India’s appetite for digitalization.
Popular e-payment applications in India today include Google Pay, Walmart-backed PhonePe, Paytm, CRED, and BharatPe, which all utilize UPI to facilitate transactions. Since their respective launches, all of these applications have integrated a variety of additional digital payment features, including offline transactions, utility bill payments,
Before this decision, WhatsApp had been limited in onboarding UPI users for Whatsapp Pay, with an initial cap of 1 million users in 2020 (later raised to 100 million users in 2022), which required WhatsApp Pay to take a phased approach to expand its UPI user base.
Therefore, despite currently having a relatively small share of the payments market, the removal of the user cap for WhatsApp will enable significant market share capture by India’s top communication application, with the merging of both communications and payments services potentially establishing WhatsApp’s, and a Meta-developed super app’s, dominance in the digital Indian market.
Superapps in India
Most popularized throughout the globe by WeChat and AliPay, superapps have played a big role in the digitization of Southeast Asian countries, with Singapore’s Grab, Indonesia’s GoJek, and South Korea’s KakaoTalk revolutionizing everything from ride-hailing to food delivery to digital payments, among many other services.
Despite these positive trends elsewhere throughout the world, superapps in India have not received much success, with one prime case study being Tata Group’s Tata Neu, launched in 2022, which has experienced exponentially declining interest due to many different problems. This failure could be due to market saturation from entrenched players, lack of interest from local audiences, high market share capture costs, and/or a myriad of other factors.
However, the removal of barriers against WhatsApp, combined with its existing popularity, especially when combined with capabilities offered by other Meta products, could help supercharge a Meta-built platform to superapp status in India.
What’s next for WhatsApp (and Meta)?
The Indian social media market is already dominated by Meta products such as Facebook and WhatsApp, with Indians being the primary driver behind Meta-owned platform downloads. As a result, Meta’s foothold in India remains strong, giving rise to the potential of a Meta-built application with WhatsApp integration being India’s first undisputed superapp.
Meta is deeply entrenched in India in both private and public contexts. On the private front, Meta announced an expansion of its business subscription program to Indian users in July 2024, followed by an October 2024 announcement of a Meta partnership focusing on generative artificial intelligence (AI) with global conglomerate Infosys. One recent public sector partnership included the September 2024 announcement of Meta to work with the Telangana government to provide Indians with emerging technologies such as AI to enhance e-governance and citizen services. Another recent public partnership included the October 2024 announcement to partner with India’s Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE) to integrate AI and VR into Skill India to increase and incubate talent Indian talent.
Conclusion
While an independently-created Meta-developed superapp, or even enhancements on WhatsApp, may seem far-fetched to some, the fact remains that Meta controls India’s most popular communication and social media platforms. The removal of restrictions on onboarding users to digital payments for one of those platforms, WhatsApp, highlights an immense opportunity for Meta to develop India’s first widely-adopted super-app.
However, regardless of whether a Meta-built superapp is in development or not, it is clear that WhatsApp has and will continue to play an important role in Indian digitalization, whether through its status as India’s #1 communication platform or as a growing digital payments application.
