As of May 2nd 2022, businesses can start messaging customers without having to complete Business Verification or Display Name reviews

Businesses will only need to complete the Business Verification if they want to scale business initiated conversations, or become an Official Business Account (Green Label status)

Note: there is no change to any pricing. Remember, the first 1,000 conversations each month are free of charge. These conversations can be user-initiated or business-initiated. If businesses exceed the free tier of 1,000 conversations per month, they’ll be charged per conversation.

How will onboarding work?

1. Create a WhatsApp Business Account (WABA) either via WhatsApp Embedded Sign Up or Vonage's standard onboarding
2. After WABA onboarding is complete, Meta will automatically run compliance checks in the background, following Meta’s standard policy guidelines
• If this check fails, customers will be notified and the WABA will be disabled
• Vonage can appeal the rejection, if required
3. Activate the number. If using Embedded sign up, follow the steps in the portal to activate the number. If using Vonage’s standard onboarding, the team will organise the OTP Verification call to activate the number. Follow our Post-Go Live Guide to help with configuration 
4. Start sending messages! For unverified business managers, there are usage limitations; see below for more information
5. If/when required, businesses can start the Business Verification process 
• Business Verification process remains unchanged
6. Once Business Verification is approved, the display name review is triggered automatically, for all numbers within the WABA
• Display name guidelines remain unchanged 
7. With the business verified and display name approved, businesses can scale business-initiated conversations following Meta’s standard messaging limit tiers, can add more than 2 phone numbers to the WABA and can request Official Business Account (Green Label) status

What are the “unverified” limitations?

After a WhatsApp Business Account (WABA) is created, either via WhatsApp Embedded Sign Up or through Vonage WhatsApp onboarding process, businesses will be able to:

• Respond to unlimited customer-initiated conversations (24-hour messaging windows)
• Send business-initiated conversations to 50 unique customers in a rolling 24-hour period
• Register up to 2 phone numbers

If a business manager is already verified, then these limitations will not apply.  To increase these limits, businesses will need to complete the Business Verification process, as below. 

There is no time limit to this stage.  Businesses can remain on this "unverified" status for as long as required, only completing Business Verification to scale or gain Official Business Account status.  

When to complete Business Verification?

1. To scale business initiated conversations; i.e. want to send business-initiated conversations to more than 50 unique customers in a rolling 24-hour period
2. To add more than 2 phone numbers to the WABA
3. To request Official Business Account Status (i.e. have green label status) 

Once both the business verification and display names are approved, businesses can use WhatsApp as standard. Note: standard message limit tiers are still in place. The limit will first be increased to 1,000 unique customers in rolling 24 hours, and increase to 10,000 and 100,000 or unlimited as normal.