Former BharatPe co-founder Ashneer Grover on Wednesday took a dig at social messaging service WhatsApp after its India head Abhijit Bose and Meta Platforms Inc.’s India lead for public policy, Rajiv Aggarwal, resigned from their positions, berating the UPI payments service for being unable to penetrate the market.
“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 a picture. It should have beaten Paytm PhonePe and GooglePay. Country managers can’t win you markets - good riddance now!” he said in a tweet.
Meta India head Ajit Mohan resigned from his position earlier in November to take another role at Snap Inc. Whereas, according to a Bloomberg report, Rajiv Aggarwal is set to take a role at Samsung Electronics Co's local unit.
According to the data from the National Payments Corporation of India, UPI payments via WhatsApp Pay amounted to about Rs 708.56 crore in October, while major players including PhonePe recorded transactions amounting to Rs 5,93,759 crore during the month. In terms of volume, WhatsApp Pay recorded 8.38 million transactions in October, against 2.60 million transactions in October 2021.
The former Shark Tank judge also shared a picture of WhatsApp’s print advertisement on the messaging app’s security features, berating the company for not investing in improving its payments services.
Grover is one of the co-founders of merchant payments application BharatPe, which was founded in 2018. However, he resigned as the company’s managing director in March this year, embroiled in controversy over his wife, Madhuri Jain Grover’s termination from BharatPe owing to financial irregularities.