I wrote a piece a few months ago in Harvard, noting the difficulty of competing in a world dominated by Google and Facebook. Facebook has built the platform, it can keep adding on top of it. A few weeks ago, it was Facebook Shops. This week, the new one is WhatsApp Pay. So, it goes for this ICT utility company which is already a key part of the 21st digital infrastructure. When you control DEMAND, you become the digital king; Facebook will squeeze more sectors because it has the users. I have a construct for it: The Inversibility Construct.
Facebook has announced the launch of its payment system via WhatsApp, as part of its effort to delve into fintech and ecommerce. The CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Monday that the launch is starting in Brazil.
“Today we’re starting to launch payments for people using WhatsApp in Brazil,” Zuckerberg said in a statement posted on Facebook. “We’re making sending and receiving money as easy as sharing photos. We’re also enabling small businesses to make sales right within WhatsApp.”
“To do this, we’re building on Facebook Pay, which provides a secure and consistent way to make payments across our apps. I want to thank all our partners for making this possible. We’re working with local banks, including Banco de Brasil, Nunbank, Sicredi as well as Cielo, the leading payments processor for merchants in Brazil,” he added
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But in Nigeria, we still have more people with BVN than the combined total of people across all the social media platforms. So we will soon find out if the problem is payment systems or not having money to even get involved in the first place.
Of course the focus is small businesses, because no one expects those who transact large sums to turn their social media handles into a banking channel.
Maybe they should incorporate offering loans with small rates and without collateral, that’s something that can really move mountains; not telling people to transfer money they don’t even have.
We see how it goes.
Your comment’s straight ahead.
I’ve seen this things happening sometimes ago when the Facebook released the cryptocurrency white paper ‘Libra’. With the already existing infrastructure on Facebook, it can pivot into any digital niche.
Once you have the aggregation platform, nothing is impossible.