How Malaysia’s largest telco closed the loop on WhatsApp payments with Meta’s Alpha Webview program
Telecommunications
The Results
Prepaid reloads and top-ups are impulse-adjacent transactions, like a customer topping up because their balance just ran out, or renewing a plan in the middle of using it. Journeys like that are unusually sensitive to friction: every extra step is a chance for the customer to defer the transaction or abandon it altogether. Removing the redirect out of WhatsApp meant capturing that intent at the moment it existed, rather than losing it in the handoff to another app.
Being the first telco in Malaysia to take Webview Payments live before general availability also meant an early, direct hand in shaping how the capability worked for high-volume, recurring-transaction businesses, feedback that fed back into Meta’s product development ahead of a broader regional rollout.
The Client
Malaysia’s largest telco serves millions of prepaid and postpaid subscribers across the country. Its Consumer Business unit runs high-volume, high-frequency transactions, including reloads, top-ups, and bill payments, that make up the daily rhythm of how subscribers interact with the brand. For a business at that scale, even small amounts of friction in the payment journey compound into meaningful revenue and engagement loss.
In 2026, it partnered with ADA and Meta to become the Alpha launch partner for Meta’s Webview Payments capability, the first deployment of its kind in Malaysia, and among the first in the region. The result is a payment experience that never leaves WhatsApp, and a measurable drop in the friction that had been quietly costing the business conversions.
The Challenge
The brand’s Consumer Business had already made WhatsApp a core acquisition and service channel, where customers discovered offers, asked questions, and started transactions there. But the moment a customer needed to actually pay, the experience broke.
Completing a prepaid reload, an internet top-up, or a postpaid bill payment required exiting WhatsApp entirely: a redirect to a mobile browser or a separate app, a fresh login or OTP step, and a checkout flow that had nothing to do with the conversation the customer had just been having. Each of those handoffs was a place a customer could simply give up.
The Solution
1 Click-to-WhatsApp entry point
Campaigns across its digital channels used Click-to-WhatsApp ads to bring customers directly into a conversation with the brand, the same entry point that had been driving engagement, now extended all the way through to payment rather than stopping short of it.
2 Conversational Flows for transaction setup
Inside the chat, customers selected what they needed—a prepaid reload, an internet top-up, or a postpaid bill payment—through a structured WhatsApp Flow. The Flow captured the transaction details (number, plan, amount) in the same clean, form-like interface customers were already used to from other WhatsApp interactions, without leaving the app.
3 Native Webview checkout
At the point of payment, a native Webview interface opened inside WhatsApp itself, connected directly to its payment gateway. Customers completed the transaction, using a card, e-wallet, or other supported method, without a browser redirect, without reauthenticating, and without leaving the conversation. As the Alpha launch partner for this capability, the operator and ADA worked closely with Meta’s product team to test, refine, and validate the Webview payment flow ahead of general availability.
4 End-to-end, single-channel journey
Together, these three pieces closed a loop that had previously been broken across multiple surfaces: a customer could see an ad, tap into WhatsApp, select a service, and pay, all inside one conversation, on one channel, with zero steps outside it.
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