As means of digital payments evolve between users and businesses at large in different cities, tools such as the WhatsApp API become integral to bringing small businesses online – especially from the unorganized sectors. Addressing the audience on the first day Global Fintech FestivalIn 2021, Abhijit Bose, country head of WhatsApp in India, spoke with Sujit Nair, CEO and co-founder of the Bacon Foundation, to outline how, along with payment tools, tools like the WhatsApp API can help micro-enterprises and small businesses. will be important. , different business owners visit online platforms.
Simplify to Digitize
Transformation, as both Bose and Nair highlighted, would have to be simplified to maximize adoption – to be adopted successfully, while offering value in terms of direct business conversion. “We are at a stage now where a small businessperson in an unorganized sector may still shy away from technology to a great extent. The maximum exposure to technology platforms for such a person is apps like WhatsApp, that too as an individual consumer. For such users, offering them a cumbersome process to jump through multiple vendors, different parties and platforms will take them away from digitizing their businesses, and such actions will hinder the growth of bringing businesses online. Nair said, talking about the objective that her Bacon Foundation works with.
“This will be especially true for the unorganized sector, which is a major part of Indian businesses,” Nair said. With his assessment, Bose outlined how services such as the WhatsApp API have grown “significantly” in recent times to help enterprises realize this ease of operation. Although he didn’t reveal the numbers specifically, Bose did claim that there is a steady increase in both onboarding as well as user adoption across businesses of all sizes. Talking about “custom digitization” for small businesses, Bose said that the WhatsApp API can help these ventures to implement resources from the unified India stack to come online.
Unified platform demand
As far as market demand is concerned, Bose claimed via WhatsApp data that 81 percent of adult users actually prefer to message a business while transacting online, and 76 percent more likely to make purchases. Chances are, if they are successful in connecting with a business through messages. So to enable businesses to connect with users, Bose claims that among other things, the WhatsApp API will help reduce operational complexities such as the adoption of technological processes for a transitioning business. “So our platform can help replace specific cost structures, therefore democratizing access to technology for everyone in our country,” Bose said.
Bose cited examples such as the CovidAsha chatbot, which was built by solo entrepreneur Elisha Lobo on the WhatsApp API, which provides support in conjunction with some of the biggest technology platforms such as Google, HP, VMware and others. For example, this chatbot is meant to provide accurate information about hospital availability and oxygen supply during the devastating second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in India. As an example of the flexibility of the WhatsApp API, Bose described how one such platform is now live in seven Indian languages, while others such as the MyGov WhatsApp chatbot have proven capable of handling thousands of queries every day.
Mass market potential
All this results in Bose’s optimism, which he says has so far led to an increase in adoption of WhatsApp banking services – especially in under-served markets. He also explained how smaller F&B and retail vendors, who could not afford their own, dedicated apps, can now leverage WhatsApp as a combination of an app and a communication service – one such platform. It is offered with, with millions of people already using it. . For example, small businesses and their founders are taking orders through direct messages — and with features like Pay, WhatsApp may want to be a one-stop app.
Going forward, it will be interesting to see whether the infamous fuss around the WhatsApp privacy policy will affect its adoption in the long run. While the Facebook group attempted to mitigate the perception damage by citing end-to-end encryption, WhatsApp’s plan to monetize through business adoption, as well as its collection of metadata to ‘support’ businesses, remained a thorn in its side. can. Whether this hurts its eventual commercial potential will be clear only as its adoption accelerates in the coming years.
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