WhatsApp Offers Pay Button in Brazil, India

Meta Platforms-owned messaging platform WhatsApp says it wants to make it easier for users in Brazil and India to make payments with a new “Pay” button.

In an email sent to PYMNTS Wednesday (May 18), the company said the button would be available directly on a user’s contact card, allowing them to send money to friends, family, and loved ones.

Read more: WhatsApp P2P Payments Return To Brazil

“We’re always working on new ways to unlock the potential of payments on WhatsApp,” Stephane Kasriel, Meta’s head of commerce and financial technologies, said in the email. “By adding a Pay button to the contact card on WhatsApp, we hope to make sending payments even more intuitive.”

Meta said it launched payments on WhatsApp to help users engage with the digital economy, connect with friends and family, and reach their financial goals, sending money securely and with no fees right from where they chat.

The new Pay button is designed to make those payments more accessible and easier to use, the announcement said.

Learn more: Facebook Pay to Be Rebranded Meta Pay

WhatsApp began allowing users in India and Brazil to make payments through its app in 2020. However, the functionality was held up for a year in Brazil after its central bank said it had concerns about the system.

The announcement came on week after Meta revealed it was renaming Facebook Pay — its payment system available on Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp — as Meta Pay.

“We’re focused on enhancing the payments experiences we already provide with Facebook Pay where we’re seeing good adoption,” Kasriel wrote in a blog post. “And with this, an emphasis on quality in the countries that we are already in, rather than expanding to new countries right now.”

See also: Small Online Sellers Get Chance to Install a Big Tech ‘Buy Button’

Earlier this week, PYMNTS noted that the one-click “buy button” simplicity made popular companies like PayPal and Amazon are also on the wish lists of smaller online sellers, an opportunity FinTechs are not letting escape.

In what he said was “probably the biggest thing that we’ve ever done,” Payoneer CEO Scott Galit told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster that his company’s Checkout acceptance functionality announced last week illustrates the “overall democratization of opportunity that we think is one of the defining mega trends of the digitalization of commerce.”