In India, Whatsapp are looking to move into the pension, loan & insurance business.
They’ve been working with banks to explore ways to bring financial services to those who haven’t yet become part of the banking population!
Does anyone else find this super interesting?
Financial inclusion is really important, and the way to do it, is to go to the channels where the customer already is, and help them there. 400 million users in India is a fairly large total addressable market…
WhatsApp is a great channel to do this in India, but it wouldn’t necessarily work everywhere.
In terms of small business, being able to provide a payments facility between customers and businesses is a great additional service, but unless they can integrate it with the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) in India and get regulatory approval, it remains in beta testing. The power of the people might force the regulator’s hand to allow it, but things went the other for WhatsApp in Brazil recently and it got shut down.
Oh, I didn’t hear about this - do you know why they had to shut it down? Whatsapp is huuuge in Brazil, isn’t it?
It was paused by Brazil’s Central Bank - citing an assessment of risks, compliance, monopolies, competition, data protection…etc etc
But looks like they now will allow it to go ahead (or as long as Facebook agree to comply with the regulations…so… 
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