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Comment by Entangled | Hacker News Reader

Make it a money remmitance platform and allow one billion people to send a trillion dollars a year charging just one percent in fees (ten billions in revenue) while providing merchants with extra apps and features for a premium.

A couple of days ago I was ordering a pizza by phone and they told me they had a whatsapp channel to take orders so I thought paying using whatsapp would be perfect. No need for annoying ads or invasive data collection.

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  > No need for annoying ads or invasive data collection.

But they've already built infrastructure to do all this surveillance, the incremental cost is minimal. It's just too tempting to pass up on the low-hanging fruit.

Not a bad idea, but might be hard to execute. Finance is often pretty tightly regulated because you could use WhatsApp to launder money, especially when the communication is end-to-end encrypted.

So it's not impossible, but it would be a challenge on pretty uncharted territory. But hell, Nintendo pivoted from simple toys to video games successfully so this could work it pretty well.

Actually, WhatsApp does support payments via the UPI framework in India. It hasn't caught up among businesses but it is gaining popularity among people to transfer cash from one person to another.

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