When it comes to user engagement, Facebook’s reigns supreme above all others.
WhatsApp has exceeded 1 billion users, and Facebook Messenger reports 900 million users, handling 60
Facebook Messenger chat bots
billion messages a day combined — three times the number of traditional text messages.
The combination of chat and payments have already proven to be a great success, as exemplified by the launch of Facebook Pay, Snapcash by Snapchat, WeChat’s integrated payment solution and Kakao Pay in Kakao Talk in South Korea – according to an article in Techcrunch.
However, the potential for chat apps in financial services is by no means limited to social payments. Facebook has already confirmed that they are pursuing Wechat’s success, venturing into eCommerce. This is only the beginning.
The introduction of chat bots on the Facebook messenger platform could revolutionize the way we look at relationship banking. Digibank in India is based entirely on a chat interface, and allows its customers to do all their everyday banking needs through a chat interface.
Facebook messenger’s chat bots will have a significant impact on banking, as a majority of banking services could be automated through simple chat request like “what is my daily spending limit until my next paycheck” or “approve and pay my outstanding bills”. The impact of chat bots is not limited to simple daily banking requests. AJ Bell is aiming to utilize Facebook chat bots to offer trading services for investors, as well as Personetics that delivers personalized financial guidance to customers everywhere through their AI-powered chat bot.
The bots for messenger platform represent a unprecedented opportunity for incumbents to increase customer engagement. Banks are in possession of vast amount of user data that is invaluable for unsupervised machine learning as well as intangible know-how through years of experience for supervised machine learning.
Chat apps and virtual assistants is predicted to be the future of user interaction, and may even replace traditional web browsers and traditional online search as we know it. Banks should not underestimate the disruptive power of chat apps. Remember, it was a banker who once said: The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty – a fad.
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