Vinay Cholatti’s departure comes barely four months after WhatsApp Pay India leader Manesh Mahatme resigned in September to rejoin Amazon as Director of Product and Engineering.
With the departure of Vinay Choletti, the CEO of WhatsApp India’s payments and financial services unit WhatsApp Pay, the company has lost its second CEO in less than four months.
Choletti’s departure comes barely four months after previous WhatsApp Pay India chief Manesh Mahatme resigned in September to rejoin Amazon as Director of Product and Engineering. This follows the resignation of WhatsApp India CEO Abhijit Bose on November 16.
“The last one year personally has been a great learning journey and the excitement of being in the frontline and launching some global first payments use cases such as ‘QR tickets for Bangalore Metro on WhatsApp’ was unmatched. I am humbled to see the customer adoption of novel use cases using WhatsApp Pay and I will wear these badges proudly for the rest of my life,” he added in the LinkedIn post.
Choletti announced his departure from WhatsApp in a LinkedIn post on December 13.
Choletti led merchant payments at the firm before taking over as head of the payments part of the Meta-owned messaging app. Following a seven-year career at Amazon, he joined WhatsApp in October 2021, months after Mahatme.
These changes come on the heels of Facebook’s parent business letting off 11,000 employees globally on November 9.
India is the largest market for the Meta-owned messaging service, with over 400 million users. On November 1, Moneycontrol exclusively reported that the app is on target to make $1 billion in revenue in India by next year.
Since its launch in November 2020, WhatsApp’s UPI-based payment service has been limited by limitations on its user base, causing it to fail to take off in a substantial way in the nation.
The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which handles the country’s retail payment and settlement systems, has steadily increased the service’s user ceiling, which is now at 100 million.
According to NPCI data, WhatsApp Pay presently has a miniscule 0.1 percent of the entire UPI market, compared to rivals PhonePe (47.2 percent) and Google Pay (34.2 percent).
