Bose and his team will focus on helping businesses, both large and small connect with their customers.After months of being pushed by the government to set up a local team here, messaging platform WhatsApp has announced appointment of Abhijit Bose as its India head. Bose, who has served as co-founder and CEO of electronic payments company Ezetap, is seen bringing his experience of working with a financial services firm to WhatsApp, which is facing regulatory hurdles in the full-scale launch of its payments feature.
An alumnus of Harvard Business School, Bose has also worked with NGPay – one of India’s first mobile commerce companies that was acquired by Flipkart. He is expected to join WhatsApp early next year. “Bose will build WhatsApp’s first full-country team outside of California and will be based in Gurgaon,” WhatsApp said in a statement. “Bose and his team will focus on helping businesses, both large and small connect with their customers,” it added.
The appointment comes at a time when the Facebook-owned messaging company has been under tremendous pressure to put in place a mechanism to curb fake messages on its platform, that incited mob fury. The government has been pressing WhatsApp to develop tools to combat fake or false messages, and also identify message originators. Apart from the traceability request, the government had asked WhatsApp to set up a local corporate presence and appoint a grievance officer to address complaints. WhatsApp has recently appointed a grievance officer for India. WhatsApp’s full-scale launch of its payments feature has also been in a bottleneck, particularly on the grounds of local data storage that has been made mandatory by the Reserve Bank of India.
The move points towards an increased focus by Facebook on India, and follows the appointment of the social media company’s India head in September. After two years of remaining without a country head, Facebook, in September, appointed Hotstar CEO Ajit Mohan as managing director and vice-president of its
India operations.
