The strategy involves growing small business ecosystems; provisioning easy access to businesses; growing the volume of digital payments; and investments to drive social impact, along with other partners
BusinessToday.In
Dec 16, 2020,
Updated Dec 16, 2020, 5:40 PM IST
WhatsApp has come out with a four-pillar strategy for India. Abhijit Bose, Head (India), WhatsApp, came out with India-centric four-pillar strategy during Facebook Fuel for India event today.
The strategy involves growing small business ecosystems; provisioning easy access to businesses; growing the volume of digital payments; and investments to drive social impact, along with other partners.
Grow small and micro business ecosystem: WhatsApp plans to continue innovating and bringing-in new features to the 'WhatsApp Business' application, which will directly cater to enable small businesses and kiranas to build better efficiencies.
Easy access to business services: WhatsApp also plans to focus on Application Programme Interfaces (APIs) for Businesses. This would initially cater to large enterprises, enhancing customisation, and will ultimately extend to catalysing the growth for NGOs, as well as for crucial public services.
Grow digital payments: WhatsApp will continue supporting the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) across segments of goods/services, with an emphasis on the underserved users in India so as to drive financial inclusion.
With partners, invest to drive social impact in India: With partners across edtech, agritech, among other, WhatsApp plans to invest in India by developing social impact programs. Enabling people to access financial services on their respective devices, WhatsApp is collaborating with financial institutions on test-runs for services such as micro-pension and micro-insurance. By the end of 2020, WhatsApp can be used to buy the services of HDFC Pensions, pinBox solutions, as well as health insurance coverages from SBI General.
"Pension and social protection arrangements in India have been traditionally restricted to the formal sector salary workers. This is a gigantic problem, given that over 90% of our workforce are self-employed or are informal sector workers. Without pension benefits, each of them faces a very high risk of extreme poverty...WhatsApp platform will help us connect the supply and demand, as well as bring scale to our inclusive digital micro-pension programs," said Gautam Bhardwaj, Co-Founder of the Singapore-based pinBox Solutions about contributing to changes in India's socio-economic sphere.