How Meta Is Supersizing WhatsApp

WhatsApp's advantage is that it is the first app millions of Indian check first thing in the morning and innumerable times during the day and night.

Axis Bank, India's third-largest private sector lender, has 15 million people registered for its WhatsApp service, and adds a million more every month.

Managing Director Amitabh Chaudhry says the bank has sent 210 million messages using WhatsApp and disbursed Rs 930 crore in personal loans through the platform.

Axis Bank is one of the several reasons why Meta, which owns WhatsApp, in addition to Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, sees India at the centre of its global push to monetise messaging, with WhatsApp as the axis.

'India (is) a country that's at the forefront of a lot of what we're going to talk about today. You're (India is) leading the world in terms of how people and businesses have embraced messaging as the better way to get things done,' Zuckerberg said in his keynote session through a video link at the Conversations event in Mumbai on September 20.

This is the first time the annual event was held in India.

India might

WhatsApp is a global messaging platform used by 2 billion users. Of those, more than 450 million -- 22.5 per cent -- are in India.

A large percentage of WhatsApp's 200 million business users are in India.

Globally, people and businesses conduct 600 million WhatsApp conversations a day.

Meta says daily conversations between people and businesses have more than doubled in the past one year in India.

A slew of recent initiatives has stepped up Meta's efforts to monetise these numbers.

At Conversations, for instance, Zuckerberg announced the introduction of WhatsApp Payment in India, after Brazil and Singapore, in partnership with payment solutions providers, Razorpay and PayU.

It is designed to support more payment methods for people to pay Indian businesses within a WhatsApp chat.

The methods include all UPI apps, other third-party apps, and credit and debit cards.

The conference also saw the launch of WhatsApp Flows, which enables businesses to create customised experiences within chat threads, such as a way for customers to book an appointment to open a new account, order food and grocery, or book an airline ticket without having to leave the chat thread.

Consumers can pay within a chat thread using any of the various payment options.

Sandhya Devanathan, Meta's India head, believes WhatsApp is at the cusp of an Internet explosion as 250 million more Indians get ready to come on board the Internet wagon.

"These are people from Tier-II and -III towns who are not intuitive enough to use an app. They are most likely to discover the experiences in the apps that they use the most.

"We think messaging and WhatsApp can play that role," Devanathan told Business Standard during an interaction at Conversations.

The monetisation of WhatsApp, she said, had been something that Zuckerberg had already talked about as a big priority.

Closer home, business messaging is responding to what Meta sees in the market.

With this, Meta is being perceived as upping WhatsApp's play in India and could be turning it into a bonafide super app.

Supersizing WhatsApp

When we talk of super apps, the first names that come to mind are WeChat in China and Gojek in Indonesia. Both are all-encompassing e-commerce and communication platforms.

Incidentally, both came up before the influx of apps dedicated to specific functions.

In India, on the other hand, specific apps already abound, covering a range of ecommerce from fashion to food.

Analysts see this as one of the reasons why attempts by the Tata Group, with Neu, and Reliance Industries (MyJio) to create a super app have not yet accomplished the intended results.

WhatsApp's advantage is that it is the first app millions of Indian check first thing in the morning and innumerable times during the day and night.

The key is to adorn it with more services and functions and make them do more while they are in the app.

"We want people and merchants to have a fuller and richer experience right in the chat...payments become a big part of that puzzle and we will need to continue to invest in that," said Nikila Srinivasan, vice-president, product management, business messaging with Meta.

A lot of it is already underway.

For instance, Flipkart, the Walmart-owned ecommerce giant, uses WhatsApp to tap new customers.

Its CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy said during the Conversations event through a recorded message that last year during Flipkart's flagship sales event, the Big Billion Day, it engaged with 15 million users in a single day through WhatsApp. This year, he wants to top that number.

Redbus, the ticketing platform, has incorporated Flows. Customers can book tickets on Redbus using WhatsApp. In early tests, Redbus had 17,000 users showing interest and interacting with Flows in one month.

Out of these, 35 per cent of the users chose Hindi as their default language. A third of the bookings came from Tier-I cities and other two-thirds from Tier-II and -III towns and beyond.

There is also an uptick in public transport ticket bookings on WhatsApp. Bangalore Metro has 500,000 people buying tickets every month via WhatsApp.

Chennai Metro and Delhi Metro, say people privy to the development, will soon allow ticket purchases on WhatsApp.

Devanathan did not confirm this, but stressed the fact that people are buying more using WhatsApp.

Speaking during the inaugural session at Conversations, she highlighted that the ensemble she was wearing, including the accessories, was brought from small businesses using Instagram and the transaction was closed using WhatsApp.

She also said that of the 200 million businesses that used WhatsApp's business messaging, a large number were from India.

Srinivasan said the idea of bringing businesses closer to the user was being done in a way that was simple, reliable, and private.

"India, Brazil, Mexico and Indonesia are our priority markets. But India is often quoted as a priority market and you will see a lot of us here in the coming years."

Having tied up with Razorpay and PayU, Meta will keep looking for more tie-ups. With these two players, WhatsApp is making sure it reaches a large merchant base.

Razorpay has access to 5 million online merchants. PayU serves more than 4.5 million merchants.

The attempts to supersize WhatsApp brings Zuckerberg face to face against Elon Musk, the boss at Tesla who also owns X, earlier known as Twitter.

The intent behind the change of name was to turn the microblogging platform into a super app.

The cage fight is off, but the fight is on.

WhatsApp's India Playbook

Number of users in India: 450 million

Daily conversations between people and businesses more than doubled in the past one year in India

Feature Presentation: Ashish Narsale/Rediff.com