The approval comes as Meta seeks to use the Brazilian market as a key test space for business messaging, an area that has assumed greater urgency as Meta's core advertising business has stalled.
WhatsApp users in Brazil have been able to make payments amongst them through the application since 2021, but the new development clears the way for merchants to receive payments. As Guilherme Horn, head of WhatsApp Latin America, says, WhatsApp users will be able to pay for products and services directly in a conversation with Mastercard and Visa debit and credit cards
Recently, the South American country has been facing innovation after innovation. In February UK-based fintech Lanistar went live with Google Pay operability to its virtual payment card in Brazil. Lanistar was founded in 2019 with the ambition to build a fintech unicorn that challenges the status quo of old-fashioned, traditional banking services.
The company has been expanding rapidly in Brazil, having gone public in the country in mid-2022. The Lanistar mobile app allows customers to manage and control all of their financial products from one place, with a virtual card to allow purchases to be made online or now via Google Pay.
A couple of weeks following Lanistar’s announcement, Mercado Bitcoin successfully tested a tokenized version of the Brazilian digital real using the Stellar network. This is one of the first steps of the digital real project, which represents Brazil’s efforts to create a central bank digital currency. As such, local cryptocurrency exchange Mercado Bitcoin conducted a series of pilot tests that explored the interconnection of a tokenized version of the digital real.
Since the pilot testing phases were successful, they proved that the Stellar blockchain could act as a proxy for the operation of the digital real. Mercado Bitcoin says the plan was to prove the feasibility and safety of conducting transactions with digital assets using a representation of the real on public networks.
Brazil is also diving deeper into the depths of Open Banking and it has started the second phase of Open Insurance implementation, which will run until July 2023. This allows for the sharing of personal data such as customer registration and movement related to products if the customers provide their consent.
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