Facebook selects London as the hub to build WhatsApp's mobile payment feature

Facebook has selected London as the hub for the development of WhatsApp's new mobile payment feature.

Facebook plans to hire as many as 100 software engineers in the UK, according to Bloomberg. While most of the new staff will be based in London, some operational staff will also be hired at company's headquarters in Dublin, Ireland.

A spokesperson said that London was selected as the main hub for WhatApp's upcoming payments feature because the city routinely attracts a large number of people from countries where the app is immensely popular, such as India, where more than 200 million people use the messaging app.

London, of course, is also a major financial centre with a concentration of IT, legal and finance talent that the company can readily draw upon.

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WhatsApp was bought by Facebook in 2014 and is currently used by around 1.5 billion people worldwide. Mark Zuckerberg now wants to make money off the popular messaging platform and, analysts believe, adding a payment feature to the app could provide the company with a lucrative revenue stream.

WhatsApp's payments feature could pose a competitive threat to services such as Western Union, MoneyGram and TransferWise, as well as big-name banks, in cross-border payments. At the same time, though, it may also present new regulatory challenges.

Last year, Zuckerberg announced that a WhatsApp's mobile payment feature would be rolled out in several countries in 2019 following an initial trial in India.

I believe it should be as easy to send money to someone as it is to send a photo

"Payments is one of the areas where we have an opportunity to make it a lot easier," Zuckerberg said at Facebook's F8 developers conference in 2018. "I believe it should be as easy to send money to someone as it is to send a photo," he added.

The staff based in London will not only focus on developing and maintaining a secure payments feature for WhatsApp, but will also build products for safety and combating spam on the app.

WhatsApp belatedly introduced end-to-end encryption in 2016 so that nobody could trace or view messages sent on the platform. While the encryption feature has been successful in protecting the privacy of users, it has also led to misuse, critics claim, in the form of sharing of child abuse images, as well as false and misleading information.

To address those issues, WhatsApp has been trying to develop AI algorithms that will be able to identify 'bad' content in messages and spot patterns of abuse in images.

The London and Dublin teams will also work on these features, according to WhatsApp.

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