The Making of Facebook’s Payments and Commerce Ecosystem. The Playbook to WIN.

Gaurav Sharma
22 min readDec 31, 2015

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In Zuck, We Trust

Facebook is one of the most underrated companies in the world, and now this ubiquitous network, connecting everyone around the world, is silently and carefully building a new money and commerce ecosystem. This ecosystem will impact how digital payments, communication, and social commerce progresses in the near future. But before that, here’re some quick facts to set the context:

1) Facebook is a global community of 1.55 billion users, with 800M people on Messenger, 900M on WhatsApp, and 300M on Instagram, and GROWING.

2) In 2014, global banks collectively earned $1T on a capital investment of $10 trillion (ROE 9.5%), including $600B made in Transactions and Origination (Payments, Fees, Advisory, etc.) related activities.

3) In 2014, Facebook applied for Irish regulatory approval to become a payment and remittance processor.

4) The total number of credit cards issued in the world is approximately 1.6 billion across four major networks — Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover.

5) Facebook already has money transmitter licenses across 48 states in the US. Recently, Facebook was also granted a patent for the “risk assessment and scoring” of its users.

In comparison, PayPal has 173mn active users, and Apple has 800mn credit cards on file, courtesy of iTunes. Apple Pay has 60mn registered users and about 3mn active users.

Facebook Messenger has already launched P2P transfers in the US as a localized test. For the time being, it can store money deposited by its users and transfer funds from one Facebook member to another.

This functionality can offer a practical, alternative banking and remittance system to millions of people who do not have a bank account or those who want to transfer money to friends or families within the USA easily.

So what does all this mean? — To understand it better, let’s look at the bigger picture.

The Village economy-The Economic Evolution of Civilization — and Facebook’s Blueprint So Far

To understand the future, it is important to trace the past. For thousands of years, the economy of any civilization has evolved in three distinct stages.

· Stage 1 is community creation — People come together, settle next to each other, and form connections. In modern-day terminology, this is represented by the ‘social network.’

· Stage 2 is the beginning of commerce — After trust and social links have been established, people start transacting (exchanging information, goods, and services), and commerce grows.

· Stage 3 is the introduction of payments & credit — Continuity and growth of commerce require ‘payments’ to settle a transaction between a buyer and a seller, and the availability of ‘finance and credit’ to accelerate this process.

“COMMERCE always follows COMMUNITY, and to facilitate COMMERCE, we need PAYMENTS.”

As you can see, the progress of Facebook over the years can neatly serve as a modern-day analogy for this economic evolution. That’s how beautifully this paradigm ties in with Facebook’s overarching strategy for internet domination, which is why merely calling Facebook's plan “a big deal” is slightly understating its importance and potential impact.

Facebook is the largest consumption platform on this planet, and this can cause massive disruption in the Payments, Commerce, and Finance Industries.

· PAYMENTS & REMITTANCE — The market size for local P2P payments and cross-border remittance was $1 trillion and $580 billion, respectively, in 2014.

· SOCIAL COMMERCE & LOCAL SERVICES — Digital goods and services constitute an approximately $600 billion market.

· CREDIT & FINANCE: International household consumer finance is a $4–5 trillion market and offers a large opportunity in the emerging market ecosystem.

Local and International Remittance:

Local remittances via P2P payments are estimated to be $1 trillion in value, and P2M payments are expected to be a $5–7 trillion opportunity. Let’s call it the “working capital” for the global household economy.

In 2014, immigrant workers sent approximately $600 billion to individuals in their home countries (cross-border remittance), with the largest financial inflows to the ICPM corridor (India, China, Philippines, and Mexico). Most of this money is typically routed through two companies — Western Union and MoneyGram — a duopoly in the global remittance market. The average cost to transfer funds is ‘punitive’ at 7.6%, even going as high as 10%.

Since 2012, a gap has been created in the international money-transfer market due to the exodus of mainstream banks, such as HSBC and Barclays, because of growing fines and money laundering concerns.

While there are some new entrants in this space — such as TransferWise, World-Remit, and Xoom — none can match the scale of Facebook’s 1.5 billion users and more, most of whom transact and transfer billions of dollars every day outside of Facebook’s ecosystem. The potential to capture this payment volume by extending payment functionality to allow the community to send actual money to one another or to merchants within the Facebook platform is massive.

Digital and Social Commerce:

Digital Commerce is scaling at a mind-boggling rate. The volume of digital goods (eBooks, vouchers, news, videos, music, subscription services, paid apps, etc.) transacted is enormous. Digital Commerce is a dynamic paradigm, unlike physical commerce, where goods have to be stored, transferred, and delivered, and then the money is collected.

However, to win in the future — Virtual Reality, Entertainment, Content, and Commerce paradigm — the payments functionality is an absolute must. Last year alone, Facebook drove 3.5 billion app installs across desktop and mobile and distributed more than five billion pieces of content from third-party apps on the platform.

Social (Conversation) Commerce: If you have a keen eye, you might have noticed the “buy buttons” appearing on Facebook and Instagram. To enable the ‘buy’ transaction, a payment functionality — within the platform that allows the user to discover, select, buy, and pay — is the key.

Facebook is encouraging businesses to open a Store to fix the supply side of commerce. These stores are still in the testing phase, but some already feature “buy” buttons to allow the entire shopping experience to happen within Facebook — from product discovery to checkout.

A significant opportunity that Messenger & WhatsApp are positioned for is — Contextual (Conversational) Commerce, where the transaction starts with the conversation and is completed (including payments) within the messaging app.

Amazon and Alibaba lead the pack in e-commerce, but they do not own the “largest community and interest graph” of buyers. This is where Facebook is better suited to leverage and power social commerce.

Facebook is also testing local markets to facilitate local commerce with the platform. One correct way to do so is to let people get comfortable, adjust their behavior with the product, allow them to store money (prepaid), and use it for in-platform purchases and transfers.

The marketplace seems to be a big focus for Facebook, which is intent on turning its social network into a portal for everything you do online or in apps, whether that’s checking the weather or sports scores, buying movie tickets, ordering food, searching for jobs, watching videos, playing games, and more.

Local Services Marketplace is another big opportunity for Facebook. Connecting the people who ‘need’ services to people who ‘provide’ services by leveraging — Social, Location, Reputation, Relevancy, and Machine Intelligence. Maybe, a step towards eliminating unemployment by creating the world’s largest and most efficient Marketplace for Local Services & Skills. Anyone?

Local Services MarketPlace

Here’s something by Greylock partners on — The rise of the uncollared worker and the future of the middle class.

Like the cultural and professional shifts that arose from white collar, blue collar, and pink collared workers, we are now in the era of the “uncollared worker.” The rise of this new uncollared workforce will fundamentally and permanently change the future of work. While some have argued that this shift amounts to little more than the oppression of labor by capital and a devaluing of the middle class, We believe that the uncollared workforce offers a viable new path to sustaining the middle class.

The uncollared worker is a new class of worker — born out of the Great Recession and the ubiquity of mobile technology — that makes a living by leveraging their time, and sometimes their assets, on marketplaces like Airbnb, Uber, and Lyft. These uncollared workers work independently, but collectively offer a singular service — like hotel, transportation, or delivery.

The uncollared economy is growing fast.

Credit & Finance:

Currently, the credit market is dominated by large regional banks and non-bank entities. In 2014, banks generated $400 billion as interest income and $600 billion as transaction and origination fees. However, with changing dynamics in technology, most retail banking businesses have increasingly become vulnerable to competition in profitable sectors such as consumer finance, mortgages, insurance, SME lending, retail payments, and wealth management. Thus, in the not-so-distant future, when billions of dollars of commerce are powered through facebook’s ecosystem, there will emerge an opportunity for consumer finance as well.

Here, it is important to note that Facebook already has a patent for risk assessment and profiling of borrowers using its proprietary algorithms and technology. This might lead to some strong partnership models emerging between Facebook and banks/FinTechs.

Part 2 — Integration of Commerce, Conversation, Distribution, and Payments within Messenger and WhatsApp Platforms.

The unbundling of Facebook Messenger is my favorite growth hack. Messenger today has more than 800 million MAUs and is growing rapidly. In July 2015, Messenger launched P2P payments in the United States and might extend it to other parts of the world. There is another sleeping giant within the Facebook universe, WhatsApp, which has more than 900 million active users but prefers to remain silent about its payments and commerce ambitions.

So how will payments (in Messenger) work? Here is a short demo by David Marcus, head of Messenger.

Messenger Payments Screenshots

Messenger Peer-to-Peer Payments service allows the user to link their debit card to their account to pass money through messaging. The Messenger app now includes a small “$” icon above the keyboard which opens a payment screen where users can type the amount they wish to send.

At present, Facebook is not charging fees on transfers, and, for now, the ability to send money directly to contacts is limited to the US. Soon this will be expanded beyond US borders.

However, the real story of Messenger goes beyond payments. This is the start of conversational and contextual commerce.

The Rise of Conversational and Contextual Commerce

Humans are social animals, and the conversation bubble (within messenger and Whatsapp) is one identifiable “point of least friction” to complete a transaction. This can be achieved when commerce and payments are embedded in the conversation.

A big step in that direction is the recent partnership between Facebook and Uber — Now, you can order your ride within Messenger.

My experience in China and other SE Asian countries, using Weixin (WeChat) and Alipay for booking a taxi, checking flights, making payments, and video calls, etc., has reinforced my conviction that a chat-based messaging, payments, and commerce platform is the future of the “attention economy.”

WeChat- Source a16z

Facebook is already getting ready for a world without websites, mobile apps, and mobile numbers by transitioning their proprietary Messenger app into an all-encompassing platform, primarily an operating system on which entire businesses and third-party apps can be built in ways that lock them into the Facebook ecosystem.

The business model here is not payments but commerce and advertisement because the margin in payments is very thin. Businesses and local merchants will want to pay to be featured or promoted, which is a much bigger opportunity. But payments and commerce are interconnected in the digital world.

As I write, Facebook Messenger is enabling companies to connect with their customers on the platform, initiate video and voice calls, share location, make P2P payments, and use the “tools of expression.” Messenger is also experimenting with an artificial intelligence-powered personal assistant called “M.”

The possibilities of development around Messenger and WhatsApp are infinite, and I’ll write a separate post on that sometime soon.

Line Messaging App — with Official Accounts

The “new conversation”: Messenger and WhatsApp for business communication and services.

What’s more, messaging platforms are becoming mini-webs — all-in-one spots for us to do way more than talk to our friends. For a glimpse of the future, look at the Chinese/Asian messaging platforms. Chinese users buy movie tickets on WeChat, play the lottery on it, shop on it, and even book travel over it.

Though it’s still early days, Facebook’s integration of the business into Messenger could be the company’s ticket into the wider world of online retail, by seizing on a strategy that’s long been employed by mobile messaging apps like Line and WeChat.

Messenger and WhatsApp are strongly positioned to own the “new conversation”- a de-facto network for companies to interact with consumers. With 45M+ businesses/Facebook business pages, exploring is worthwhile.

Messenger and WhatsApp can become major new commerce and content platforms for millions of marketers and brands when positioned as a replacement for mobile web, apps & SMS, and could have dramatic implications for commerce, customer service, and content distribution.

Facebook already has both sides of a global marketplace. — And there is an opportunity to turn Messenger & WhatsApp into primary communication and commerce channels to reach a massive user base.

The Evolution of Money: From Barter To Banknotes and Now, “Bits and Bytes”

Money is “bits and bytes.” Historically, money was used in many forms: cattle, cowrie shells, coins of silver and gold, paper, and, more recently, plastic cards.

A large chunk of microtransactions in the world still happens in CASH. In India, the number is as high as 95%, if not more. The McKinsey data holds that " more than 2.5 billion people globally do not use financial institutions or conventional banks.” These economies are almost entirely cash-based and suffer from the chicken-and-egg problem: since no one is willing to convert cash into an electronic form, there is no incentive for merchants to accept electronic payments and vice-versa. The cycle continues with nothing to sustain this conversion and the transmission of electronic money.

Money moves through an evolutionary process. There is still a long road before digital payments become the norm in cash economies. Crypto will follow the digital trend, although early-stage experiments will continue to run parallel.

While payments open the door for growth, it possibly pales in comparison to the larger opportunity for Facebook: offering a way for people who do not use banks now to do commerce.

However, the world is changing. By 2020, nearly every person on the planet will have access to the Internet. When every household on the planet has access to a smartphone with a fast Internet connection, the paradigm changes, and the idea that we need plastic cards, paper money, or bank branches fades away. This has already started to happen.

In China, I already see Alipay and WeChatPay getting used seamlessly. For example, in February 2015, during the Chinese New Year, WeChat users sent and received more than 3 billion “lucky money” red envelopes using the app.

With such support for a world where transactions occur without intermediary instruments such as banknotes or plastic cards, it is easy to imagine a future where workers in developing countries get paid through Facebook/Messenger/WhatsApp (FMW) via P2P payments, store their money on FMW, and even purchase local goods and pay merchants using FMW.

Thus, the effect that FMW could have on the payments and commerce ecosystem is nothing short of profound.

So why should Facebook facilitate millions of transactions and online purchases for next to nothing?

For one, it gets them closer to the holy grail of data — how users spend their money. Not surprisingly, the core of Facebook is a data and ad network.

The Holy Grail — DATA — Strengthen the Core:

Here’s an example. People assign Facebook “likes” to products and ideas regardless of whether they are customers.

While “likes” on commercial products or pages allow people to make an educated guess on consumer response, the act of assigning a “like” alone cannot answer whether the “like” giver is a customer with certainty.

However, in a world where Facebook could combine financial transactions and social graphs, advertisers would be given near-perfect information about their audience. No other tech company in the world would be able to match Facebook’s targeting capabilities — viz., interest, emotions, transaction, purchase behavior, income, savings, and social graphs.

The recent financial results validate the growth of Facebook’s contextual advertisement in a mobile world. Their mobile advertisement ARPU is higher than that of Google.

Facebook’s recent patent also allows it to build risk profiles of community members based on their social and transaction history and share them with banks and financial institutions. This technology could allow lenders to use a borrower’s social network to determine whether he or she is at good credit risk.

The patent states, “When an individual applies for a loan, the lender examines the credit ratings of members of the individual’s social network who are connected to the individual through authorized nodes. If the average credit rating of these members is, at least, a minimum credit score, the lender continues to process the loan application. Otherwise, the loan application is rejected.”

Payment information is the holy grail. If Facebook can track purchases, it can build richer profiles based on browsing patterns and actual cash spent. Even better, if users end up buying things they’ve seen advertised on Facebook, it will allow the company to prove that their ads were worth the money. That would cement Facebook’s position as a “must-buy” for advertisers and further secure its advertisement business.

Ultimately, technology is changing one of the most primary mediums that touch every person on the planet — money.

Digital payments are required to facilitate seamless digital commerce.

Bank for the Millennial(s) — Digital Generation

Today, the Internet is deeply disrupting the financial services sector. Accelerating network speeds and the rapid evolution of smartphone is changing the banking industry.

Our currency is data — a series of ones and zeros. Sometimes, we convert these numbers into paper money at a nearby ATM, but mostly we shuffle them in and out of our account with things like electronic bill payments, direct deposits, debit card transactions, or sometimes a paper check.

In the future, our financial service providers will look less like existing banks and more like technology companies.

When I think of the “banks of tomorrow,” I think of Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Google, and I wonder, “When will banking get redefined in the same way as the music, movie, and book industries have?”

Keep in mind that the Facebook ecosystem includes sleeping giants such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram, which reach more than 1.5 billion people and possess a global ambition to cover the rest.

“So will Facebook’s, Amazon's Apples, and Google’s of the world replace existing banks?”

My answer to that question is: “NO.”

The reason is simple. “Who would control the base infrastructure if Facebook did these things?”

— “The banks would.”

Remember that all innovation in banking, such as PayPal, has happened on the old banking infrastructure of the past, and it will continue to be so in the near future.

Banks are regulated and need licenses; this is an essential governance feature of our monetary ecosystem.

So, rather than Facebook and Apple replacing the banking system, we are more likely to see some form of partnership model emerge where Facebook would partner with, say, Wells Fargo or Citibank to offer services.

A perfect example: Facebook could provide data access to Lending Club for risk-scoring and targeting the right borrowers, while Citibank offers credit lines.

Steadily, such collaborations will lead us to the inevitable age of “banking as a service. Facebook’s proposition should be to open its APIs to local banks and institutions and let them integrate into the platform.

So what are other big technology companies doing in payments?

Google has been trying to leverage its 900+ million active Gmail user base to push its email-based payment system. Their earlier efforts to kick-start Google Wallet did not yield desired results. Google is also making a re-attempt at P2P payments with Android Pay (a new avatar of Google Wallet).

Apple Pay: Apple Inc. has 900 million active accounts attached to an iTunes payment system. It was launched with much fanfare in 2014 and currently has a head start on most of the payment players, but there are significant challenges in customer and merchant adoption. By several estimates, it has 60 million registered members; however, only 3 million people are actually using it. The outcome of their recent strategy to get into P2P payments is to be seen.

Tencent-Owned WeChat (Weixin) is an instant messenger service in China with more than 700M users. It operates as a payment processor (WeChatPay) and has now morphed into a provider of everything from financial services to remittances. As early as 2013, users in China have been able to register their bank accounts on the app.

Alipay (Ant Financial) is a giant in China, powering more than 75% of transactions, and is a formidable player with 400 million users. Alipay operates across channels and platforms and is more than just the Chinese equivalent of PayPal (as incorrectly compared by some in Western media). Alipay, however, is likely to face stiff competition from WeChatPay in the coming times.

PayPal has been on an acquisition spree with Venmo (P2P payments), Braintree (Gateway), and now Xoom (Remittance) and making some real progress. PayPal is also moving towards mobile payments with its apps and one-touch payment services, most recently using the fingerprint scanner on smartphones to authorize payments.

Amazon Pay has plans around consumer payments; however, we have yet to see any significant public step in this direction. Amazon has two options for payments: Checkout by Amazon and Amazon Simple Pay. I greatly respect Jeff Bezos and their team, and it’ll be interesting to see how they build payment infrastructure to power the Amazon “everything” ecosystem.

Facebook will have to compete with established technology platforms that have millions of customers with credit cards attached to their services. However, in emerging markets, payment instruments are the equivalent of credit cards, and Facebook is best positioned to leverage this opportunity, especially in countries where banking infrastructure is not as mature as it is in the US or Europe.

These opportunities, however, only play a fractional part in Facebook’s over-arching plan to dominate the Internet. In fact, one could say that Facebook’s endgame is to turn itself into ‘The Internet’ for global users.

Part 3 — Facebook is the Internet.

The visible Internet is a combination of several stacks or layers.

Outside of content distribution, the internet serves to fulfill many infrastructural & functional purposes — from communication to identity and from location to commercial transactions. Facebook is slowly taking over all these functions, either standing unchallenged in some categories or competing with stack leaders in others.

Facebook has made the mobile platforms — Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram — the focus of its expansion strategy in emerging markets. India, which accounts for more than 140 million of its 1.5 billion users, is already the fastest-growing user community within the Facebook ecosystem.

Increasingly, for millions on this planet, Facebook is the Internet, with its content discovery, news notifications and alerts, instant articles, influencers, and interest communities, native videos and in-app player, Messenger, save for later function, events, Notes, sharing and reminders, and much more. What once started as a student profile network for Boston colleges has now morphed into an all-encompassing social platform with limited need to visit any other application or website.

I foresee Facebook becoming a sort of utility in the emerging markets for identity, education, information, commerce, payments, communication, and entertainment.

This was also articulated very recently by Jeremiah Owyang.

Facebook is replicating just about every social media feature and more to become a social operating system. It’s easy to miss their evolutionary progress when features are dropped out, but when you list much of Facebook’s progress, you can see how they’re eating the online world…. Facebook is quickly evolving beyond a social network to be a social operating system.”

So how (why) will Facebook win this War?

The peer-to-peer payment business is estimated to be a $1 trillion opportunity. There is not yet a “payments and commerce” system centered around the communication platform in the US. Alipay and WeChat dominate in China. There are plenty of wallets in India, but none has achieved the scale in P2P and P2M. Their predominant use case is utility payments(power, gas, DTH, and mobile recharge).

Facebook might not be the first mover. However, it has an enormous advantage — a strong relationship with more than 1.6 bn community members and the utility of its platform. With that scale, it can effectively overcome the serial balkanization of hardware vendors, operating systems, wireless carriers, merchant signups, customer loyalty, and trust.

Build Around Commerce:

Facebook is a massive community. The question is, "What else these community members might want?”

Payment systems are the standard answer. Payment card companies, banks, telecom carriers, electronic payment systems such as PayPal, and other tech companies, including Google, Apple, and others, are all trying to get into the game. However, the real treasure is beyond payments.

The next step in “personalization-commerce” (where a seller can offer a special deal to a specific person) is very much possible via Facebook and Messenger. This form of conversational commerce powered by Messenger and WhatsApp can be a game-changer.

Remember, Messenger and WhatsApp are no longer simple apps but commerce, communication, advertisement, and payments ecosystem.

Facebook needs a smart payment system. Ever since David Marcus joined PayPal, Facebook has taken steps to make payments work. By integrating with Braintree and Stripe, it moved in that direction, but the most significant step was to unbundle Messenger from Facebook, which allowed it to build the appropriate payment security (PCI) within the now singular platform.

With 800 million MAUs, Messenger is one of the most used communication platforms in the world, and it needs to get to a stage where users can safely and easily transfer money from one user to another, of course, for a small fee.

WhatsApp should look at China's WeChat (SuperApp/platform)model. For example, WhatsApp, with more than 200 m users, is already facilitating a huge volume of offline commerce and services in India. It is logical to build commerce and payment functionalities.

Collaborate:

Peter Lynch once said, “Competition is never as healthy as total domination.” As Apple, Google, PayPal, and others offer their money transfer services, Facebook is no longer alone in this space. However, as big as the digital payment business is, it is very likely that there will be multiple winners.

I was looking at investing in a P2P payments startup some time back and tried to process payments without the banks. No matter which direction we looked at, the infrastructure is built upon bank rails. Therefore, I believe that in the near future, the client-facing stuff will get taken over step-by-step by non-banks/aggregation platforms, but the “rails” will continue to be the banks as they also multiply and create money for the economy.

Future collaboration might include teaming up with regional or national banks to provide financial services. Facebook could manage the high-traffic online mall and lease space to partner banks and merchants to help sell their products. It could also share user profiles and extensive data to help partner banks offer personalized services tailored to individual customers’ habits. Whether users are sending money to a friend or paying a bill online, Facebook might emerge as the default personal payment system for millions worldwide. Maybe some form of collaboration with PayPal or local payment “pipes” and banks would help.

Apple Inc. was not the first to offer streaming music. In the same way, I think Facebook is not afraid to enter a crowded space. If you think otherwise, I would love to hear your ideas.

Strategic Acquisitions:

Facebook buying out Stripe could be a very smart move. Payment processor Stripe operates in the $1.5 trillion global e-commerce market and is the operating machinery behind Facebook's “buy” button.

Another remote possibility could be Facebook buying PayPal. David Marcus ran PayPal until 2014. However, the infrastructure fit and a steep price of $44 billion might be a big concern.

Having said that, Facebook is great with acquisitions — WhatsApp, Oculus Rift, Instagram, etc.

In cross-border remittance, I love TransferWise — I think they are brilliant; instead of moving the cash across borders, they maintain a local book and do an in-country settlement. Simple yet unique. Overall, it seems like a match made in heaven. Facebook needs a payment solution and cross-border remittance infrastructure, ideally in a P2P environment, while TransferWise can use Facebook’s community to scale.

Build a ‘Universal’ Payments as a Platform

To win, a payment “platform” cannot be captive to just one mobile operating system or device. The winner needs scale and should work across operating systems, shopping channels, browsers, and technology platforms.

Customers need a “universal solution” that enables them to use it everywhere they like to shop, not limited by the fragmentation we see in current payment instruments. Messenger and WhatsApp should build that platform, enabling users to use payment capabilities to pay their friends or favorite merchants and businesses.

There also won’t be just one winner. In the words of Karen Webster, However, the bigger winners will have ‘real scale,’ the “wallets” that grab consumer share and merchant volume, won’t be tethered to a device or an operating system or a channel. They will, instead, tether themselves to the cloud and the path that the consumer wants to follow — wherever those customers want to take their wallets.”

Humans will be making $16 trillion worth of retail transactions in 2016. Eventually, whoever wins will make zillions in transaction fees and collect massive amounts of customer data to control contextual commerce.

There are several formidable players, but I’ll bet my bottom dollar that Facebook will come out on top. History suggests it’s not a good idea to bet against Mark Zuckerberg ;-)

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed the post, please give it a 👏👏 and share it with your friends. This helps others discover the content. You can also find me here on Medium, Linkedin, and Twitter.

Gaurav Sharma is a product and business builder with 16+ years of operating experience (across Asia) in Consumer Tech, Digital Commerce, Online Lending, and Mobile Payments. He regularly writes and speaks about –Artificial Intelligence, Payments, Lending, Entrepreneurship, and Product Management. You can find him here on Twitter, Medium, and LinkedIn.

Other posts by Gaurav

Bots, Chat, Voice, Zero UI, and the Future of Mobile Apps.

VOICE is the new OS and the Future of Search, Commerce, and Payments

Intelligent Assistants (I.A.)

Wal-Mart moment for banks

Attention: Internet Age’s Leverage

Credit is older than Money (and Fintech)

Breaking Twigs ( on the Startup trail)

Of Suits, Hoodies, and Ripped Jeans- Transcending the “Expectation Chasm” in Banking

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Gaurav Sharma

Technology Entrepreneur / Founder & CEO. Building the Future (FinTech+AI+ Blockchain).