Facebook taps UK and Croatian IT consultancy to help with revenue growth

A Croation IT consultancy has been tapped by social media giant Facebook to help bolster its revenue growth in the market. Infobip will concentrate on the roll out of Facebook’s WhatsApp Business communication platform.

While it remains almost unparalleled as a global business, Facebook has suffered one of the most troubling periods in its existence over the past year. The Cambridge Analytica data scandal saw the personally identifiable information of 87 million Facebook users collected, before allegedly being used to attempt to influence voter opinion on behalf of politicians. On the back of this, Facebook’s shares recently declined by 18% with the news that its user growth had slowed, and the group is seeing its weakest revenue performance in three years as of 2018’s second quarter.

This makes the company’s new WhatsApp Business wing a vital new element of its empire, with the ability to reinvigorate Facebook with a new stream of revenue and data should it succeed. The service has already been tested in India, and offers small companies the chance to connect their communication segment on Facebook directly to a WhatsApp profile, adding automatic responses and even the capacity to send out flight boarding passes or receipts to employees. Now, as Facebook prepares for its first European trial of the method in Croatia, it has enlisted the help of Infobip.

Infobip is an international IT and telecommunications company, operating a full-stack Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) with private cloud infrastructure and zero-hop connectivity to telecoms globally. Services include A2P SMS messaging, A2P voice, A2P RCS, app notifications, email, chat apps messaging and carrier billing. The firm boasts a trio of headquarters, one in London, and two more in Zagreb and Vodnjan, both in Croatia. Due to its presence in the Balkan nation, Infobip is one of the largest software companies in Croatia.

Infobip will now partner with Facebook to pilot the WhatsApp Business platform in its own business. The IT advisory firm was selected on the basis that, according to a survey by British firm Roaming Consulting, Infobip is the ideal service provider to test the platform with.

The position is one endorsed by Silvio Kutic, the founder and Director of Infobip, who added that there are some great expectations for the firm’s “early access programme.” He stated, “We’re ready for this new service, with 55 offices around the world.”