Greece is an important market for Rakuten Viber

Focusing on businesses and the new electronic payment feature, which recently debuted in Greece, the Japanese Rakuten Viber puts Greece high on its global map. As announced yesterday, in the context of a special event in Athens, two new services are being added to Viber’s quiver to improve communication between businesses and users. It is typical that in 2022, 180 million messages were exchanged with sending companies via Viber.

The Greek market, where the popular communication application has a penetration rate of more than 91%, is becoming the right breeding ground for the launch of the company’s new services.

How much and how Greek users used Viber in 2021

With the pandemic having become an accelerator of online payments worldwide, the total value of digital payments is predicted to reach 9.47 trillion dollars in 2023, while the annual growth rate of the global market will exceed, according to Statista, 11% by 2027. Consumers are leaving their wallets at home and turning to eWallets.

The value of electronic payments in our country tripled in 2021 compared to 2017, reaching, according to data from the European Central Bank, around 49 billion euros. Despite this, a percentage of only 3% was made with electronic money, when it exceeds 11% across Europe, a fact that portends great scope for growth for the market of digital wallets.

In this environment, Rakuten Viber made the decision to launch its own digital wallet, Viber Pay, which it announced last summer. Given Viber’s dominant position in Greece, all of the above conspired to start with the Greek and German markets last December.

The most important market in Central Europe

Rakuten Viber’s chief revenue officer, Mrs. Cristina Constandache, mentioned, yesterday, the particularly important position that Greece holds on the company’s global “map”. By including Greece in the club of Central European countries for the Rakuten network, as it shares more common characteristics with this geographical group than with Eastern Europe, it has characterized it as the most important market in Central Europe.

Regarding the performance of Viber Pay, in this early phase of its operation, it already has 200,000 users in our country, with the total value of the transactions carried out amounting to 100,000 euros. In the German market, where the “twin” launch took place, the company’s app does not have similar penetration, as users do not exceed 3 million, but the country is considered a “strong corridor” for money transfers to Greece.

Gradually the new eWallet will be available in the 180 countries worldwide where the company operates.

Turning to business

Meanwhile, within the context of the well-known messaging and calling application, users are already seeing a brand new service of Viber, which is about grouping messages from businesses in the “Business Inbox”. In other words, they can access their communication with official business accounts through a single folder. The new function allows all business messages from official business accounts to be saved and organized in a folder, such as a bank notification, an order confirmation from a delivery service or a special offer from a store.

The folder is activated as soon as the user receives their first new business message from a business, and thereafter all messages will go there by default. Thus, it will be easier for the user to find their most recent notifications, as the folder will be at the top of their messages, but without professional messages being confused with personal ones.

The second new service is the Merchant Account where users will be able to discover all the ways to interact with a company in one place. It will house all business information, services and conversations on Viber under a single searchable business entity.

“The recent additions to Viber provide a strong foundation for introducing additional features as part of the company’s strategy to become a super-app,” Ms. Constandache said. “This strategy aims to improve the usefulness of the app for users and expands the ways in which different companies can connect with their audiences in a natural way, resulting in added value for both sides. By adding more features, services and communication channels, Viber can bring more value to both users and companies.”