WhatsApp still barely makes Meta any money. Can Kunal Shah change that?

Every business Meta builds or acquires is centred around community and advertisers. Take Facebook for instance: Mark Zuckerberg built it while he was at Harvard, creating a new urban town square on the internet. The web-based application caught the zeitgeist and moved from strength to strength.

Back then, the platform solved a distance problem. Friends who relocated after college connected with each other on the platform. Families that moved to a different country shared important moments with relatives in their home countries. The medium acted as digital glue that connected physical relationships online, and in that process created a new way for people to communicate with each other.

While Facebook, to its users, was a platform to stay connected with friends and family, to the company, these digitised interactions were a source of revenue as they could be sold to brands for targeted advertising. Every like, comment, and share represented a data point of a user.

By 2012, Instagram was still a thirteen-person company with no revenue, but its growth had become impossible to ignore. Twitter offered roughly $500 million for the photo-sharing app, and Facebook moved before that deal could close, with Mr. Zuckerberg having spent months building an informal relationship with founder Kevin Systrom over the phone.

Facebook ultimately paid around $1 billion in cash and stock, while letting Instagram keep its name, app, and independence. It was less an acquisition than a pre-emption: own the rival before it can become one.

An eye on WhatsApp

The same instinct, at a much larger scale, played out two years later when Facebook agreed to buy WhatsApp for close to $19 billion, a company with roughly 50 employees. Founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton were ex-Yahoo engineers who had built the app on a near-religious aversion to advertising; both had spent years building ad systems at Yahoo and grown to resent a business model built on mining personal data to sell pop-ups.

The night before Mr. Koum was due to meet Google’s Larry Page, Mr. Zuckerberg invited him over and promised WhatsApp would stay independent if Facebook acquired it instead.

That promise became Mr. Zuckerberg’s biggest headache. Regulators were told in 2014 that combining Facebook and WhatsApp user data was technically impossible — a claim the European Commission later found to be false. With no ads allowed inside WhatsApp and no shared data to target them with, Facebook now owned the world’s largest messaging app and still had no way to make money off it.

The data round-trip begins

That changed in 2016, when WhatsApp updated its terms of service to begin sharing phone numbers and usage data with Facebook, quietly undoing the promise that had cleared the deal. Brussels responded by fining Facebook €110 million in 2017 for misleading regulators about the merger. Mr. Acton left in late 2017; months later, amid the Cambridge Analytica fallout, he publicly urged people to delete Facebook. Mr. Koum followed him out in 2018.

But the data kept moving — once WhatsApp’s signals could feed Facebook and Instagram’s ad systems, Meta had finally found a way to value WhatsApp’s users without ever running an ad inside a chat.

What it built instead was a side door. WhatsApp’s Business API launched in 2018, letting companies message customers, automate replies, and run catalogues inside chat threads. Facebook and Instagram ads gained a “click to WhatsApp” button funnelling people straight into a brand’s chat window — turning two ad-funded apps into a lead pipeline for the third.

Payments, and a costly detour

Money followed messages soon after. WhatsApp piloted payments in India in 2018 with ICICI Bank, and launched UPI-based payments fully in November 2020 after years of regulatory back-and-forth. Around this time, Google build a standalone UPI-based payments app Tez, and then rebranded it as Google Pay.

Meta had tried building its own payment rails once before, and it went badly. In 2019, Facebook unveiled Libra, a global stablecoin meant to move money as easily as WhatsApp moves messages, alongside a wallet called Calibra.

Regulators balked, and partners like Visa and Mastercard withdrew. The Calibra wallet was renamed Novi in May 2020, and the Libra currency itself was rebranded Diem that December — an attempt to distance the project from Facebook’s name. It didn’t work: Diem’s assets were sold off to Silvergate Bank in January 2022, and Novi shut down that September, after little more than a pilot’s worth of real use.

Enter CRED’s Kunal Shah

That history sits behind Meta’s latest move. This week, Meta named Kunal Shah, founder of Indian fintech CRED, as WhatsApp’s new global head, succeeding Will Cathcart after nearly seven years at the helm, alongside a $900 million Meta-led investment in CRED that values the startup at roughly $4.5 billion.

The move reportedly began when Meta’s chief product officer Chris Cox cold-emailed Mr. Shah for advice, after months of calling entrepreneurs across India, Brazil and Mexico — markets where WhatsApp doubles as both town square and storefront.

Mr. Shah’s record at CRED, and earlier at FreeCharge, is built on turning financial behaviour into personalised rewards and recommendations. India remains WhatsApp’s largest market, with over 500 million users, and it’s also where Meta’s payments and business-messaging bets have run longest.

With phone numbers, ad signals, and business chat histories already round-tripping between Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and a working payments rail already live, Mr. Shah inherits most of the pieces Meta has wanted since 2014: a personalised commerce layer sitting quietly inside the app people use to talk to their friends and family.

Whether that takes the shape of in-chat shopping carts, credit products, or something closer to CRED’s reward-driven model remains to be seen. What seems certain is that WhatsApp will no longer be just a messaging app to Meta, but a front door to a billion wallets. For many users, it’s also the only messaging and calling app on their phone, with no real substitute waiting in the wings. That’s worth watching closely as Mr. Shah settles in, because whatever changes next won’t stay confined to a settings menu nobody reads.