Facebook chooses London as base for WhatsApp payments: Report

Facebook says it chose UK for the digital payments service because of the country's multicultural workforce.

Facebook will launch WhatsApp Pay from London before it rolls out digital payments in India, said a media report Wednesday.

WhatsApp, which has1.5 billion users globally, will hire nearly 100 people in London to focus on the digital payments service and additional operations staff would be hired in Dublin, the Financial Times reported.

Facebook said it chose the UK, where WhatsApp is far more popular than the US, because it attracts a multicultural workforce from many of the countries where WhatsApp is widely used, such as India, the report said.

Out of WhatsApp user base of 1.5 billion people, more than 200 million