Now Get a Loan From Whatsapp Payments, to enter the lending business in India

A big consumer base in India is attracting Whatsapp to start the Credit & lending business –  Facebook led whatsapp has listed credit as one of its business plans for India in the ministry of corporate affairs filing. Interestingly, no other financial services have been listed in the filings other than lending by the Facebook. It’s also not yet clear which type of lending Whatsapp is talking about whether WhatsApp would be offering personal loans to consumers or providing credit for customers looking to fund purchases through its payments platform.

With this, they would be competing with Globally, tech majors like Google which is entering the financial services space by offering customers the ability to check their account balances, while Apple launched a credit card with Goldman Sachs.

Read : What is Unified Payment Interface ?

Earlier this week, WhatsApp reached out to the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) assuring that its payments platform will be compliant with all local data protection and storage regulations by May to start the Whatsapp UPI platform ‘Pay’. Whatsapp is already having a tie up with few big banks in India like SBI, HDFC, ICICI and Axis Bank.

Whatsapp Credit & Lending business is one of its objectives of operations listed in its memorandum of association (MoA) in a regulatory filing of its local entity. The filings of WhatsApp Application Services showed this would potentially be explored through partnerships with banks because it said it won’t undertake any banking business according to the law. The regulatory documents were sourced from Tofler, a business intelligence platform.

The Facebook-owned Whatsapp also entered into a partnership with Reliance Retail recently for an online-to-offline (O2O) commerce play, which is likely to boost usage of WhatsApp Business — a separate app for small merchants.

Read – Whatsapp Pay – Really A Big Threat for eWallets & Banks

This platform had over a million such users as of last year. The commerce partnership between Jio and WhatsApp has been started in Mumbai suburbs already.