PRD- WhatsApp Payment

7 min readNov 14, 2021

PRD for WhatsApp Payment Feature

Problem:

WhatsApp wants to introduce the payment feature via WhatsApp. Write a PRD on what should be the vision of the feature, what problems you are solving, and success metrics?

Problem Space:

Target Audience and User persona

According to Experian marketing Services: WhatsApp has a median age of 36.71% of users are in the age bracket of 18–44.

Demographic TG : All people within the range of age 18–44

People who are tech savvy and are comfortable using new technologies.
People who have previously used some sort of financial products such as Paytm, G-pay, PhonePe.

Personas

Problem overview

WhatsApp wants to introduce a payment feature within its chat interface so that people do not have to leave the platform in order to make payments.

Why is it important to our users and our business? What insights are you operating on? And if relevant, what problems are you not intending to solve?

● Users have to move to a different payment provider in order to complete the transaction and later on post the payment receipt on WhatsApp.

● People who do business on WhatsApp need payment functionality.

● Competitors are already having the payment functionality on their platforms

● Users are being charged with the transaction fees on few portals

● Users are not being rewarded for any of their activity on other platforms

● Need a platform which offers everything (from discussion to requesting/splitting payments)

Goals & Success

The success metrics for this functionality would be :

WhatsApp currently has 450 million DAU (Daily Active Users) and xx % of payments being made through WhatsApp could be a good metric.

Metrics which will define success for payment feature would be (North Star):

1. Number of transactions in a month

2. Market share growth from 0.01% to 0.05–0.10%.

Activation for WhatsApp Pe : Making the first transaction

Retention : 2–3 transactions in a week for each unique individual

● Competitors:

○ Phone Pe has DAU — 0.7 million,

○ Paytm 2.6 million,

○ G-pay 0.5million

● No of transactions on each platform

○ Paytm (750mn per month)

○ Phone Pe (1400mn per month)

○ G-pay (1120mn per month)

Risks

Potential Risks:

● Acceptance could be a big threat to the payments feature as TRUST is one such factor where Facebook

has to do something in order to gain the public’s trust.

● External Threat : Local Governments might impose restrictions

● External Threat : Market Saturation and already existing competition.

Solution Space

Key features with prioritization

1. Send Money (must have)

Users need to be able to send money to others without a hassle. This should be possible from whatever bank account they have. The money first gets added to their WhatsApp wallet and then gets sent to the other person’s WhatsApp wallet like a typical transaction.

Metric to Track: Clicks on send money CTA in a day

2. Receive Money (must have)

Users need to be able to receive money into their WhatsApp Pe wallets. They should be able to receive this money from anybody using WhatsApp.

Metric to Track: number of payments received in a day

3. Request Money (must have)

Any user can request money from someone else, who is in their WhatsApp contact list. The user sends a request to the person with the amount requested.

Metric to Track: Clicks on request money CTA in a day

4. Group Payment (USP)

A group of friends can split the bills and have an equal share of the amount sent/received to each other during outings. The total amount gets split into per person depending on the size of the group and each person is able to pay that amount for the bill.

Metric to Track: Group payments made in a week ( taking into account how many users shared)

Assumptions:

1. The person who is using collect group payments is paying the entire bill.

2. If the other person has blocked the user, then all these features will not be available in his case.

5. Payment History

- Aggregation with other payment providers (Delight)

The biggest issue is, with multiple platforms being used in multiple payments, it becomes difficult to track how much you are spending. Small small payments aggregate to big amounts and you spend so much time going on each platform and collating these. Hence an aggregation solution, which shall use API’s to bring out transaction history from other platforms as well such as paytm. Phone Pe etc. all on the WhatsApp dashboard to provide convenience to the users.

Metric to Track: Recurring Visits on this page per day/week/month.

- Payment Dashboard/analytics (Delights) — Splitwise as parallel reference.

This will be a normal dashboard giving insights to the user about how much he/she has spent on which areas. For eg how much he spends on food, shopping etc. This will help users make informed spending decisions and have better financial planning.

Metric to Track: Recurring Visits on this page per day/week/month.

6. Check Bank Account Balance (performance benefits)

Usually while making payments, users do no realize if they have sufficient account balance or not. This results in failed transactions and hence bad experience. Therefore a indication of account balance on the payment platform will allow them to make payments accordingly.

Metric to Track: Number of visits on this section of the page.

7. Rewards / Cashbacks (delighter)

Every user is keen to get some reward for using the platform. This becomes the motivation or trigger for any feature/product to retain its customers, hence on WhatsApp we shall offer similar rewards/cashbacks to attract and retain more traffic.

Metric to Track: Number of rewards given | Number of repeat users.

8. Security — End to End Encryption (Must have)

WhatsApp already boasts of its end to end encryption for messages, we shall leverage this and use the application of this security feature for payments as well so that no payment information of the users is leaked and users are saved from frauds and mishaps. Thereby improving their trust and customer experience.

Metric to Track: Repeat users with multiple transactions in a week.