Messaging application WhatsApp. (Shutterstock/BigTunaOnline)

Private messaging app WhatsApp is in talks to bring its payment feature WhatsApp Pay to Indonesia, a spokesperson has said.

WhatsApp Asia communications director Sravanthi Dev told the press on Wednesday that the company was in discussions over bringing WhatsApp Pay to the Southeast Asian market.

“I know there’s a lot of interest in WhatsApp payments [in Indonesia], but I don’t have much information to share on that point other than we’re in discussions and we’ll have more news on that soon,” she said at a press briefing event in Jakarta. However, she declined to go into more details about the service.

Currently, she said, the app was testing out the WhatsApp Pay feature in India, where users can link their credit cards or other cards linked to their bank accounts to the app. Users can then conduct transactions with other users through the app by utilizing the country’s switching system, Unified Payment Interface (UPI).

Even though it had yet to officially launch the feature, there were already 1 million users in the country, Dev said.

Dev said WhatsApp believed bringing the payment feature to Indonesia was “very important”, and noted that there was also interest in bringing it to other countries where WhatsApp is popular.

By: Riska Rahman