India’s e-payment giants, WhatsApp triggered a Twitter of war

WhatsApp's entry into India's crowded online payments ecosystem has set off a public spat among the homegrown players.

Just days after the messaging service's new feature quietly debuted, the country's e-payments posterboy, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, took to Twitter.

In a tweet on Feb. 14, the founder and CEO of Paytm accused WhatsApp of using the Indian government-backed Unified Payment Interface (UPI) to create a closed garden by restricting transactions to its own users only. UPI is a payment system that makes inter-bank transfers easier for customers.

In his tweet, Sharma compared this move to Facebook's Free Basics idea, which was met with aggressive opposition in India.

After failing to win war against India’s open internet with cheap tricks of free basics, Facebook is again in play.
Killing beautiful open UPI system with its custom close garden implementation.
I am surprised, champions of open@India_Stack , let it happen !https://t.co/wIsNuF1AiB

— Vijay Shekhar (@vijayshekhar)February 14, 2018

"Facebook is openly colonising our payment system and is customising UPI to their benefit. UPI was built as an India Stack, now some American monopoly arm-twists UPI for customer implementation,” Sharma told the Economic Times newspaper.

IndiaStack is a set of codes developed around Aadhaar, which can be used to develop digital solutions.

While India's entrepreneurial community had almost unanimously supported the opposition to Free Basics in 2015, this time, Sharma received a ton of bricks.

Bipin Preet Singh, CEO of Paytm’s rival, Mobikwik, hit back without naming Sharma.

All incumbents complaining about Whatsapp getting unfair advantage in its UPI implementation to further its business interests - “Those who live in glasshouses, ....... “ . There is clear record of private companies who got access first and exclusively when UPI was launched.1/n

— Bipin Preet Singh (@BipinSingh)February 14, 2018

Those complaining abt Whatsapp are the same folks who refuse to entertain neutral payment options(like@MobiKwik )on their own ecom websites/apps and instead promote only captive wallets. A standard of interoperability should incl wallet acceptance as well 2/n

— Bipin Preet Singh (@BipinSingh)February 14, 2018

To me, the funniest and most ironic aspect of all this UPI stuff is that no one is talking about our poor banks. With UPI , banks wanted to compete with wallets. I wonder if they’ve already ceded too much control to non-banks. The story repeats . 4/4

— Bipin Preet Singh (@BipinSingh)February 14, 2018

Singh was not alone. Amrish Rau, CEO of another rival, PayU, took a dig at Sharma.

If you can’t beat them, bitch them..

— Amrish Rau (@amrishrau) February 14, 2018

Kunal Shah, founder and former CEO of e-payments company Freecharge, also disagreed with Sharma, even using yoga guru Ramdev-owned consumer goods company, Patanjali, as an example.

All companies threatened by Whatsapp payments are going to tag it as anti national and try to pull it down as it’s hard to win on merit against network effects of Whatsapp.

This strategy worked for Patanjali and wonder if it will work for payment companies.

— Kunal Shah (@kunalb11) February 14, 2018

And, as expected, the Indian-vs-outsider line of the debate soon veered towards China's Alibaba, Paytm's biggest investor.

It’s good to see that Chinese companies are standing up against the anti India Whatsapp !

— Amrish Rau (@amrishrau) February 14, 2018