Paytm's Vijay Shekhar Sharma Calls Facebook 'Evil' & Manipulative, Blasts WhatsApp Pay Feature
Vijay Shekhar Sharma believes Facebook is trying undermining the safety of UPI in order to gain a market advantage.
WhatsApp Pay is Facebook¡¯s latest attempt to capture the Indian market. It¡¯s a payment system currently being tested for the app that lets you conduct transactions using your Aadhaar-linked account through the Unified Payments Interface (UPI).
And you can bet that other payment systems are not happy, especially home-grown Paytm. In fact, its founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma is livid, recently calling Facebook the ¡°most evil company in the world¡±, as per a Business Standard report.
After failing to win war against India¡¯s open internet with cheap tricks of free basics, Facebook is again in play.
¡ª Vijay Shekhar (@vijayshekhar) February 14, 2018
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
The WhatsApp Pay feature, currently being beta tested, has raised a few eyebrows over some of the security choices made. For one thing, it doesn¡¯t require a separate login. After all, while that would make it more secure, it would also likely defeat the purpose of a convenient in-app payment system.
¡°Facebook is openly colonising our payment system and is customising UPI to their benefit,¡± Sharma ranted to Economic Times.
¡°UPI was built as an India Stack, now some American monopoly arm-twists UPI for customer implementation.¡± He¡¯s also questioned how WhatsApp was allowed to begin a pilot program with supposedly lakhs of customers instead of a few thousand.
Thanks to the feud, WhatsApp VP Neeraj Arora has been forced to step down from Paytm¡¯s board of directors, a position he¡¯s held since 2015. Sharma however insists he¡¯s not against foreign-backed companies introducing services in India, he just wants everyone to play fair.
¡°It is not at all about being protectionist. Everyone should be allowed to play the field. But no one should arm twist and tweak rules to suit their designs. I have always maintained that WhatsApp is a major security risk to India.¡±
