Can WhatsApp monetize with Jio Plaftorms kind of partnerships?

By Priyanka Pani

Social networking app WhatsApp is aggressively working towards monetizing the app. Facebook, which acquired WhatsApp in 2014, has invested a whopping $5.7 billion in Jio Platforms, the tech, and telecommunications arm of India’s largest diversified conglomerate Reliance Industries, in April this year.

Partnership with Jio Platforms

Facebook is looking to tap Jio Platforms to monetize WhatsApp even as the latter’s idea is to take-on global e-commerce players such as Amazon.in and Walmart-backed Flipkart in India. Armed with private equity funds, Jio Platforms has recently announced the launch of its e-commerce vertical Jio Mart. It has said that it would use the messaging app to let its customers place orders. Basically, if anyone wants to buy from Jio Mart can do that by just placing an order on WhatsApp.

To go live with Payments feature soon

The announcement comes in after the country’s central bank RBI gave the messaging app a green signal to launch payment features. JioMart is likely to tap it’s over 400 million customers as its potential customers. JioMart will provide them options to not only place orders on WhatsApp but allow them to complete the transaction on the app itself.

However, WhatsApp is yet to go live with its payment features in the country following some pending compliance norms. The company has plans of going live by the end of May, but it looks unlikely soon. Currently, it is open to beta users who can only make UPI-based P2P payments at present. But the company is also planning to launch P2M (person-t0-merchant) payments in the future. Once launched in India, it will compete with Google’s payment platform GPay that has over 60% market share in the UPI payments space.

Other partnerships

Besides, the app is also looking at more JioMart-like partnerships shortly. In an interview with The Hindu, Facebook India’s Vice-President Ajit Mohan said that it is looking at more partnerships in the coming months.  The company plans to tie-up with creators, media companies, publishers, platforms, and developers.

“…We have always believed that for a company like us, our success is quite vested in the success of the overall digital ecosystem. And that is very much true in India, and as much as we see ourselves contributing to it, help fuel it, we are also clear that we benefit from it, and we benefit from partnerships,” he added.