WhatsApp Pay India Head Leaves After 4 Months

The head of WhatsApp Pay India has left after assuming the role in September.

Vinay Choletti announced he is leaving the Meta-owned business in a Tuesday (Dec. 13) post on LinkedIn.

“Today was my last day at WhatsApp Pay and as I sign off, I can proudly say that watching the scale and the influence of WhatsApp in India has been a humbling experience,” Choletti said in the post.

Reuters reported Wednesday (Dec. 14) that Choletti’s departure is the latest in a series of such moves from the Indian operations of WhatsApp and its parent company Meta, including the November departures of WhatsApp’s India head Abhijit Bose, Meta’s India head Ajit Mohan and Meta’s public policy director in the country Rajiv Aggarwal.

Meta did not immediately reply to PYMNTS’ request for comment.

Choletti became the head of WhatsApp Pay India in September after serving as the head of merchant payments at WhatsApp Pay since October 2021.

In his LinkedIn post, he highlighted “QR tickets for Bangalore Metro on WhatsApp” as a key use case launched during his tenure at the firm and said he was humbled to see customers adopt additional novel use cases for the tool.

Choletti also led all regulatory and industry representations for WhatsApp Pay in India and was responsible for scaling the business tool to 50 million small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and 400 million users in the country, according to his LinkedIn profile.

“As I move on to my next adventure, I strongly believe that WhatsApp has the power to phenomenally transform digital payments and financial inclusion in India, and I look forward to seeing it leverage its potential in the coming years,” Choletti said in his LinkedIn post.

WhatsApp received regulatory approval for the WhatsApp Pay platform in India in February 2020 after a two-year experimental run.

As PYMNTS reported at the time, the WhatsApp messaging service had over 450 million users in India and a beta version of the payments service had been rolled out to approximately 1 million users earlier in the year.

Increased adoption of mobile technology has set the stage for digital payment adoption, as has India’s broadly publicized demonetization efforts.