WhatsApp, a messaging company, will work with partners such as banks and financial institutions in India to make it easier for people to access products such as insurance, micro-loans and pensions.
The company's India head Abhijeet Bose said at the 'Global Fintech Fest' that the company would also support various new initiatives to test potential solutions to address problems related to the distribution of financial products. Bose said the Facebook-owned company has been working with banking partners for more than a year to improve its digital presence and speed up financial outreach across various segments and geographies in the country.
He said: "Now we want to work with more banks. This year we aim to expand our experiments to other products to help simplify and expand banking services, especially in rural and lower-income groups. "Bose said that over the next 2-3 years the collective objective is to be able to help low-wage workers in the unorganized informal economy easily access three products – insurance, micro-loans and pensions.
He said that WhatsApp will help Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises digitize over the next 18 months. Bose said WhatsApp has around 400 million users and can bring at least 200 million new users to the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) platform. To do this, it will have to compete fiercely with Alibaba, SoftBank-backed Paytm, Walmart-invested PhonePe, Amazon and Google's units. His statement comes at a time when WhatsApp could get the green signal to start a digital payments business under UPI.
WhatsApp's parent company, Facebook, has invested a total of 5.7 billion in Reliance Industries and both companies are also expected to join hands in the e-commerce business. WhatsApp says it is looking at a range of financial products. These include a pension scheme for 300 million people engaged in self-employment. The daily cost can be 50 rupees. The company says it will work with banks, financial services companies and fintech startups to get regulatory approval.
Bose said, "Our goal is not to make payments to people." We need to make services accessible to people. He said that there are already 15 million small business users on WhatsApp's platform. The company wants to increase the number of banks using the app. It is focused on rural and low-income segments. 20 lakh customers of Kotak Mahindra Bank and 10 lakh customers of ICICI Bank are already using WhatsApp.
