Podcast: WhatsApp to enter payments space

Barely a day goes by without us having to hear something or the other from the world of social media and messaging apps that we have made a part of our collective lived experience. You wake up in the morning, and even before you’ve brushed your teeth, you know which friend got married and which friend ate mangoes; you’ve been wished a good morning by the uncle you have never seen and the cousin who’s never seen vowels; you’ve consumed “Breaking News” from “news sources” and wondered if the news was broken; you’ve consumed propaganda and misinformation and casually hit forward becoming complicit in the factory of fake news and its success. All this before you have had your morning cup of coffee.

All this on just one app – WhatsApp, that app that your allegedly "not tech savvy, Luddite" parents have come to grips with faster than you can say Mark Zuckerberg. The next time they trouble you about what to do with a remote control, point this out, and recite to them that line they told you when you were a kid - where there is a will, there is a way.

The point is WhatsApp (and to an extent Facebook) have been instrumental in incorporating the older demographic into the world of mobile technology. And now, one can even start making payments on WhatsApp. Potatoes and tomatoes (and flight tickets and television sets) bought using WhatsApp - assimilation complete. And that story is our Editor’s Pick of the Day. My name is Seetal, and you are listening to Moneycontrol.