Opera $250M Lending, Tiktok Goes Social Commerce
"Opera’s microlending business more than tripled revenue versus the second quarter; driven by 5M loans totaling more than $250 million in total loan value", Opera financials. What I expect this browser firm to become has come to pass. Most of the landing happens in Nigeria and Kenya.
Opera is a leading global internet brand with an engaged and growing base of over 350 million average monthly active users. Building on over 20 years of innovation, starting with our browser products, they are increasingly leveraging the brand as well as our massive and highly active user base in order to expand our offerings and our business. Today, we offer users across Europe, Africa and Asia a range of products and services that include our PC and mobile browsers as well as our AI-powered news reader Opera News and our app-based microfinance solutions.
Meanwhile, Tiktok, the short-form video app said it’s allowing some users to add links to e-commerce sites (or any other destination) to their profile, while also offering creators the ability to easily send their viewers to shopping websites.
On their own, these changes might not sound that dramatic, and parent company ByteDance characterizes them as experiments. But it could eventually lead TikTok to become a major force in commerce — and to follow the lead of Instagram, where “link in bio” has become one of the most common promotional messages, Techcrunch reports.
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As these redesigns happen, Facebook will surely begin to look deeper in commerce as the Libra, Facebook's cryptocurrency project, is just about "dead" now if the EU view is scaled around the world.
“Our common objective is to ensure that these initiatives do not undermine our existing financial and monetary order as well as our monetary sovereignty,” the document read. “All options should be on the table include the possibility to take measures that would impede the development of projects that would create unmanageable risks.”