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WhatsApp Pay India head Vinay Choletti has left the firm, he said, the latest in a series of executive departures for parent firm Meta in the company’s largest user market.

Choletti took over the top role for WhatsApp Pay in India in September this year following the departure of Manesh Mahatme, who joined WhatsApp from Amazon and after a year and a half in the Meta job moved to return to the e-commerce group.

“As I move on to my next adventure, I strongly believe that WhatsApp has the power to phenomenally transform digital payments and financial inclusion in India and I look forward to seeing it leverage its potential in the coming years,” Choletti wrote in a LinkedIn post.

WhatsApp, which has amassed over 500 million users in India, has been struggling to make inroads into the nation’s fast-growing mobile payments market. Google Pay, Walmart’s PhonePe, and Paytm currently lead the market whereas WhatsApp has been regulatory hamstrung to offer the payments service to 100 million users.

At stake is India’s payments market that is estimated to be worth $1 trillion in the next two to three years, up from about $200 billion in 2020, according to Credit Suisse. Google and PhonePe command over 85% market share on the homegrown payments network, UPI.

India said earlier this month that it won’t enforce a check on the market share for players operating on the homegrown payments network until December 31, 2024 in a surprising extension to the deadline that analysts say is a major a win for the incumbent market leaders.

Meta has seen several high-profile departures in India in recent months as the firm makes some internal shifts. Ajit Mohan, the former head of Meta India, left the firm late Octoberto join rival Snap as the president of the younger firm’s Asia-Pacific business. WhatsApp India head Abhijit Bose and Meta India’s Public Policy head Rajiv Aggarwalstepped down last month.

The firm appointed Sandhya Devanathan as the new head for the India business. In her new role, Devanathan will report to Dan Neary, vice president at Meta Asia-Pacific. The firm’s top India executives previously reported directly to the U.S. leadership.

Meta did not respond to a request for comment.

That’s not to say WhatsApp is not making aggressive moves into the country. Meta, which invested $5.7 billion in Jio Platforms, is working closely with the Indian conglomerate to leverage their reach.

WhatsApp Pay India head departs after only four months in the top job by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

A lawsuit against Facebook’s parent company Meta has been filed in Kenya’s High Court over its alleged role in fueling violence and hate in eastern and southern Africa.

The case claims that Meta has failed to employ enough safety measures on Facebook, which has in turn fueled conflict that has led to deaths, including of 500,000 Ethiopians during the recently ended Tigray war. The lawsuit was filed today by Kenyan rights group, Katiba Institute, and Ethiopian researchers Fisseha Tekle, and Abrham Meareg, whose father Professor Meareg Amare, was killed during the Tigray war.

The petitioners say Meta has allowed hateful content to go viral on its platform, and failed to have enough personnel, with an understanding of local languages, to moderate content.

The petitioners are demanding that Facebook stops and demotes viral hate, have enough content moderators at the content moderation hub in Kenya, and creates a restitution fund of $1.6 billion.

Meta and Sama, its main subcontractor for content moderation in Africa, are already facing another lawsuit in Kenya for forced labor and human trafficking, unfair labor relations, union busting and failure to provide “adequate” mental health and psychosocial support.

“Nairobi has become a Hub for Big Tech, and that’s notable. What we must fight against endlessly is Big Tech’s abuse of Nairobi as a base to export human suffering to Africans. Big Tech must put respect for human rights at the forefront; design AI in a way that puts people first, not profit; and resource that hub properly,” said Mercy Mutemi, of Nzili and Sumbi Advocates, said in a statement.

“Not investing adequately in the African market has already caused Africans to die from unsafe systems. We know that a better Facebook is possible – because we have seen how preferentially they treat other markets. African Facebook users deserve better. More importantly, Africans deserve to be protected from the havoc caused by underinvesting in protection of human rights,” said Mutemi.

Whistleblower Frances Haugen previously accused Facebook for ‘literally fanning ethnic violence’ in Ethiopia, and recent Global Witness investigation also noted that the social site was “extremely poor at detecting hate speech in the main language of Ethiopia.”

More updates coming

Meta sued by Ethiopians and Kenyan rights group for fueling Tigray War by Annie Njanja originally published on TechCrunch

Bondaval, the London-based B2B insurtech that gives credit teams assurance that customers will fulfill their financial obligations, has raised $15 million in Series A funding led by Talis Capital. The round included participation from returning investors Octopus Ventures, Insurtech Gateway Ltd, Truesight and Expa, and new investors FJ Labs and Broadhaven Ventures. Talis Capital general partner Tom Williams will join Bondaval’s board.

TechCrunch last covered Bondaval when it announced its seed funding in October 2021. Since then, it’s expanded its reach to 31 countries in Europe and North America, and grown its team to 20 people, with plans to hire more. Its clients now include BP and Shell.

Bondaval’s new funding will be used on hiring, expanding into new international markets and adding more use cases for its platform. The startup has now raised $25 million since it was founded in 2020 by Tom Powell and Sam Damoussi.

Bondaval’s flagship product are MicroBonds, which serve as an alternative to traditional bank guarantees and trade insurance by fractionalizing the underwriting process. Since surety bonds are usually reserved for large scale transactions and contracts, that means their underwriting is lengthy and expensive. Bondaval speeds up the process and makes it more accessible through through its proprietary credit risk decision engine, which analyzes the probability of a default over a bond’s terms, and enables Bondaval to issue MicroBonds at scale. Customers buy MicroBonds to assure credit teams that they will fulfill the terms of a contract.

Without MicroBonds, credit teams have several options to mitigate risk. For example, they can decide not to extend credit and ask customers to pay upfront in cash, but that means both sides have less liquidity to grow their businesses. Credit teams can ask for collateral-based security, including bank guarantees, but those take about three to six months to enact, and also leave customers with limited liquidity. Another option is credit insurance; the drawback there is that those policies can be cancelled by insurers. Underwritten by S&P A+ insurers, MicroBonds seeks to solve all those problems by giving credit teams and their customers a faster, non-cancellable alternative that is available online.

When TechCrunch first covered Bondaval, it was focused on independent retailers and the supply chain. Small retailers can still benefit from MicroBonds because they only need to pay an annual premium instead of posting collateral-based security, which means more liquidity. But Bondaval has expanded into new use cases for credit managers at large companies, who need to secure payments on a portfolio basis. These include companies in the energy sector, like current clients Shell, BP, Highland Fuels and TACenergy.

In a statement, Williams said, “We are impressed by the opportunity for MicroBonds which can be applied in so many different ways, and the sheer size of the opportunity is mindblowing, to the point where it could transform credit. We see limitless potential for Bondaval and are delighted to be part of the journey.”

Bondaval raises $15M Series A for its alternative to traditional bank guarantees by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch