Why doesn't Facebook do it in the US? Too much opposition from the large payment processing lobby?
Facebook just got bloodied by regulators and the Congress over Libra.
U.S. payment rules are also quite strict. Brazil’s are too, but Facebook was comfortable ignoring those.
> Too much opposition from the large payment processing lobby?
If payments regulation worked like that, Stripe and PayPal and Venmo and Apple Pay wouldn’t exist.
I don't know how much of the complex regulatory barriers to the payments industry are designed by industry insiders with an explicit aim to stifle competition, but the fact that there are only a small number of actors in the space indicates that it's far from a "free market".
You can have a corrupt market full of lobby-influenced regulatory barriers and still have more than a pure monopoly. Sometimes you have a small number of competitors, or 1-2 firms with the lion's share of the market. Sometimes you have a cartel. Sometimes newcomers even break through regulatory barriers through innovation!
All that to say that your evidence doesn't do much to support your claim.
This goalpost was never set. The original assertion was industry insiders blocked Facebook from launching WhatsApp Payments in the U.S.
Stripe and Venmo and Apple are valid counter-arguments to that claim. Barriers exist. But if those companies could surmount them, Facebook, with its massive lobbying arms, could as well. The explanation is thus a bad one for the observation.
WhatsApp is however overwhelmingly used in Brazil, and highly lacking good Venmo-like apps. I did not like the Brazilian Fed getting in the way with regulations before it even launched. Sends the wrong message to foreign investors considering Brazil.
It really always baffled me why Americans were using text messaging for so long (and complaining about lack of encryption and so on)
Because our mobile plans gave us gigantic buckets (thousands of SMS messages per month, then unlimited) before most other countries. It was the lack of such that drove the growth of WhatsApp and similar systems elsewhere.
>(and complaining about lack of encryption and so on)
Yeah, no one does that, any more than people complain about the lack of encrypted email.
(Yes, yes, it's possible to do both. My point is that most people don't bother in the first place.)
Well most people here in Germany constantly complain about the lack of privacy thanks to Facebook and still don't mind using WhatsApp.
I haven't been to the US myself, but I have met a lot of internation students from the US and Canada. All of them were mainly using either iMessage or Facebook Messenger, they were really surprised why everyone is using WhatsApp here.
Anyways, actually privacy focused apps like Threema or Signal don't seem to be popular anywhere, so I don't think there is a significant difference
There's a few popular apps that allow you to share payments in Brazil, such as:
PicPay Rappi Mercado Pago
It's also an opportunity to kill competition, since almost everybody uses WhatsApp.