Snooping row: Govt mulls safety audit of WhatsApp Pay; launch to be delayed

Last week, Facebook-owned WhatsApp said it was filing a federal complaint in the US against Israeli technology firm NSO Group

WhatsApp Pay may not launch anytime soon in India, as the government is planning a comprehensive safety audit of the payments platform, according to a source in the know. The payments vertical of the chat app has been running on beta for the last one year.

Top officials in key ministries, including finance and information technology (IT), are of the opinion that a sensitive payments system such as Unified Payments Interface (UPI) should not be on a platform whose security is possibly compromised. Reserve Bank of India (RBI) officials who deal with fintech also fear that financial data of Indian users