ONE of my takeaways from the 2019 Viber Privacy Summit in Singapore is that end-to-end encryption, which means that only the sender and the receiver are able to see the messages and media shared, is very important.
We caught up with Viber sometime last year as they marked their 10th anniversary via a video call with Djamel Agaoua, the CEO at Rakuten Viber, and Anna Znamenskaya, the Chief Growth Officer at Rakuten Viber, about recent developments in the company during this pandemic.
From its goal of offering free calls to iPhone users in 2010, Viber is now a comprehensive communication platform that offers a suite of features like messaging, group chats, video calls and chatbots. All these features are protected by end-to-end encryption.
In 2014, Viber became part of Rakuten Inc., a world leader in e-commerce and financial services, and in 2018, Viber introduced Communities which allowed users to create supergroup chats where they can add an unlimited number of people. In 2019, Viber launched the group voice calls feature.
Viber has a strong presence in over 190 countries, with 100 billion messages and call minutes exchanged in the past decade.
A significant milestone in Viber’s history is its severing all ties with Facebook due to issues regarding security of its users’ data. Viber pulled out all its ad spending on Facebook and removed the Facebook Connect and GIPHY features within the app.
In 2020, Viber formed a special chatbot for the World Health Organization to help provide people with reliable and life-saving information about Covid-19. In the Philippines, the Department of Health created its own Viber Community to intensify its online reach in providing updates on the Covid-19 situation in the country. This led to the creation of the Kira chatbot to disseminate health and safety tips and answer FAQs.
In 2020, Viber introduced group video calls and bolstered its capacities when the pandemic started to accommodate the higher-than-usual number of calls and messages within the app, doubling the maximum number of participants to 20 people at once in Group Video and Audio Calls. In the first half of 2020, the app recorded an 18-percent increase in activations, 104 percent in Community messages sent, and 109 percent in Community views in the entire Asia Pacific region. These mark a 208-percent surge in Community messages sent and 129-percent increase in Community Views from 2019.
“By introducing new product features, capabilities and improvements like Chatbot Payments, we empower our users to accomplish more in so much lesser time. We did so without having to renege on our commitment to protect their right to data privacy at any point within the app, ultimately giving them the freedom not only to genuinely express themselves but also lighten their load and ease their worries at the same time,” said Djamel Agaoua.
In the Philippines, Viber said there was a 2.5x increase in Community viewers and 2.7x growth in messages sent to Communities in the country. There was also an increase in the following: 43 percent in daily activations, 17 percent in monthly active users, 18 percent in daily active users, 22 percent in outgoing calls and 35 percent in incoming answered calls.
Rakuten Viber has also announced the launch of Chatbot Payments through a partnership with Google Pay and Apple Pay last year. This feature enables users to purchase the products and services of merchants securely and accept payments directly through the app, marking Viber’s move toward fintech.
Rakuten Viber is rolling out this feature in the Philippines after securing partnerships with local industry leaders like Globe. Through the Globe partnership, Filipino users can check out and order from small food businesses through the FoodPH bot. Viber said it will soon allow users to pay for their orders via in-chat payments.
“All these milestones and partnerships we’ve achieved so far are just the beginning of what’s in store for our users in the coming years. Our users’ satisfaction remains to be our driving force why we aspire for bolder and bigger goals,” said Anna Znamenskaya.