WhatsApp Payment System is Suspended by the Brazilian Central Bank Just 8 Days after its Official Announcement

Users in Brazil would be the first to be able to send and receive money by way of a messaging app, using Facebook Pay, the payments service launched by WhatsApp last year.

Once WhatsApp announced that it would allow sending and receiving money through its application and had chosen Brazil to be the first country to receive this news. The announcement was made on Monday, June 15, and the solution would arrive in the country in a few weeks. For the WhatsApp service to be enabled, it would be necessary to register a card with a debit payment function to make transfers and there would be no costs for users. WhatsApp was already working with Visa and Mastercard to implement the function in the application.

But this afternoon, on June 23, BACEN (Brazil’s Central Bank) decided to suspend the operation of the WhatsApp payment service in Brazil.

The BACEN motivation for the decision is “to preserve an adequate competitive environment, which ensures the functioning of an interoperable, fast, secure, transparent, open and inexpensive payment system.”

So, BACEN prohibits the use of WhatsApp for payments on behalf of the competition?

It seems that BACEN is entering into the territory of free enterprise and using the force of law to prevent competition.

This is weird.