Viber, the messaging app owned by Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten, has long been dancing around the area of fintech, launching services like money transfer and chatbot payments in various countries over the years. Now, it is making a move to double down on that strategy: it’s launching Payments on Viber — a new service that will let users set up digital wallets tied to their Viber accounts.
Linked to other bank accounts as well as Visa and Mastercard, Payments wallets can in turn be used to make bill payments and buy goods, as well as transfer money to other individuals. Peer-to-peer transfers will be the first of these services to launch, and these will be free. Services like payments to businesses like will have some fees attached.
The service is being launched first in two markets — Germany and Greece — with the plan being to extend that to the rest of Europe, and then Viber’s wider global footprint of 180 countries, this year and next.
Viber CEO Ofir Eyal said the reasons for starting with these two countries first were strategic.
Greece is what he described as a “purple country”, where Viber is installed on the phones of some 91% of smartphone users in the country, working out to 7 million Viber users in a population of 10.7 million, and making P2P transfer more viable (there is an option to transfer money to non-Viber users, but it is less seamless, he said).
Germany, meanwhile has just 3 million Viber users, but Eyal described it as a “strong corridor” for transfers to Greece. Viber also happened to win a security award there recently, he said, “so brand perception is strong.”
For now, Viber’s pre-existing payment services — such as chatbot payments — will continue to stay in place where they are live — mainly Ukraine, Bulgaria and Hungary, Eyal said. These have to date facilitated “millions” of transfers, but as Payments expands, they will gradually be wound down with Payments functionality replacing them.
Viber has a large team of engineers working on its app — in addition to voice and video calls and text messaging, it provides a complement of other media and third-party integrations for users. But interestingly, this turn to fintech is being done in partnership with an outside partner.
Rapyd, the “fintech-as-a-service” startup that provides a wide variety of embedded financial services by way of APIs to a host of other companies, is powering Payments in the two initial launch countries. Eyal noted that Viber might work with Rapyd in other markets, too, or it might opt for other partners. He also noted that Rakuten is not investing in Rapyd, nor does it have plans to. Viber might also incorporate services from Rakuten itself or companies that Rakuten does invest in as Payments and Viber’s fintech ambitions overall expand, he added. Viber is not handing the whole operation to Rapyd: it will be providing tech and data to fill out “KYC” aspects …read more