There are no truly global ones yet (though alipay has 500m accounts). Rather a hodgepodge of companies in developing countries have been rolling out their own,

There are no truly global ones yet (though alipay has 500m accounts). Rather a hodgepodge of companies in developing countries have been rolling out their own, with a lot of success in recent years. The first wave was telcos, which largely failed with the exception of a tiny few (eg m-pesa in kenya, globecash in philipenes). Banks entered the frey but struggled. Then the new wave came around, led by Alipay and Wechat. They kick started their wallets by leveraging existing products (ecommerce, chat) before expanding it to point of sale. This model is growing strong (see go-pay, grab-pay, paytm). But the whatsapp problem could have been solved by a far more traditional route. You dont need people to pay on whatsapp, but rather just need the $$ to get to whatsapp. For that type of thing electronic voucher distribution could have been leveraged, in the same way that play, games vouchers, itunes vouchers work. So Whatsapp sell codes at a 5-10% discount to 3 large companies (paid in advance), who then onsell through a network of parties until someone wanders up to a street stall, gives a dollar-equivilent in cash to the owner of the stall and receives their code. The code when entered extends the subscriptions. Everyone in the chain takes a portion of the fee. If your feeling particularly fancy you can replace the entire voucher with a realtime call that activates that persons subscription. But needs to be on a per-country basis.