As Vijay Shekhar Sharma cries foul, here’s what other Indian payment leaders have to say on WhatsApp Payments

Well, WhatsApp Payments has definitely started a Twitter debate amongst the Indian payment company heads.

Exactly a week back, WhatsApp kicked off its payments feature within the app. To this, Vijay Shekhar Sharma-led Paytm took a strong stance stating that the National Corporation of India (NPCI) has created an unfair playing field for the global messaging behemoth.

Speaking to YourStory, Deepak Abbot, Senior Vice President at Paytm, also said,

Technically the WhatsApp interface is interoperable, but the UX seems to be completely hinting that transactions are between WhatsApp to WhatsApp only. The NPCI’s Beta guidelines clearly mention that you need a password for the app. They (WhatsApp) won’t because it will affect their UX. So why this distinction for a bigger player?

Jumping in the discussion was the poster boy of Paytm, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, himself. He blamed that Facebook is killing the open UPI system through its close garden implementation.

Hours later, Vijay also replied to a tweet which accused him of dismissing the issue of capital dumping earlier and now alleging that WhatsApp is colonising Indian payments.

He stated that the NPCI was bending from their open standards — a bit too much for one company over the other. The tweet said,

While Paytm’s long-time competitor Mobikwik also came out in the open to state its views, Bipin Preet Singh, Co-founder of MobiKwik, chose to rather highlight the double standards within the Indian payments ecosystem.

In a series of tweets, he stated,

Finally, he asked whether the powers of UPI have finally been ceded to the non-banks.

While on the other hand, there was Kunal Shah, Founder of payment wallet, Freecharge, who stated that payment companies which are threatened by WhatsApp are going to tag it as anti-national.

Taking a slightly sarcastic approach was Amrish Rau, CEO of PayU India, who replied saying it's good to see that Chinese companies are standing against WhatsApp. However, he did point out the great user experience of WhatsApp.