WhatsApp India Head, Meta India Public Policy Director Stop: Details

WhatsApp’s India head Abhijit Bose and Meta’s India public policy director Rajiv Aggarwal have resigned, a Meta spokesperson said on Tuesday. The departure follows the exit of Meta’s India head Ajit Mohan, who left this month after four years in the job to join rival Snap. Meta is also in the midst of massive layoffs announced last week, cutting more than 11,000 jobs or 13 percent of its workforce, as the Facebook parent reiterates its bad bets amid a slumping advertising market and decades-high inflation.

A Meta spokesperson said both exits are not related to the current layoffs. The company has appointed Shivnath Thukral as its new director of public policy in India and the company will look for a replacement for Bose, the spokesperson said.

Facebook has been facing regulatory challenges in India where Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration has been tightening regulations governing Big Tech companies.

WhatsApp, the messaging service owned by Meta, has been looking to step up its payments service in the highly competitive market and take on established players such as Alphabet’s Google Pay, Ant-backed Paytm, and Walmart’s PhonePe.

A few months back, the head of WhatsApp’s payments business in India, Manesh Mahatme, also quit to join Amazon India. While working on WhatsApp Pay, the company received regulatory approval for double payments that served 100 million users in India, its largest market with more than half a billion users in total.

WhatsApp introduced cashback rewards this year to attract more Indians to its peer-to-peer payments service, although restrictions on the number of users who can use its service mean it continues to face stiff competition from rivals.

© Thomson Reuters 2022