Here’s how Facebook Messenger will change banking

Here’s how Facebook Messenger will change banking

The Facebook Messenger platform opens many doors for easier, better digital interactions by enabling businesses to embed codes in chat conversations. Businesses can now obtain user messages, translate them into action requests, and send back automatically generated or manually-typed-by-human responses to the users. This is a faster, simpler, and richer experience than mobile app interactions, which require users to navigate through a mobile app, click on different links, load new pages, and wait for confirmation.

The new Messenger platform will affect the banking industry significantly because most banking services are tasks that can be automated, and instructions can be provided in simple human language (e.g. “pay my Internet bill”).

Today, if I want to send money to someone, I must complete the following tasks:

1. Open my banking app
2. Login to my account
3. Wait for authentication
4. Navigate to Send Money
5. Enter payee information, my account, and amount
6. Submit request
7. Confirm order
8. Receive confirmation

There are usually a few seconds of wait time between each of these steps as new pages are loaded and I navigate to the right buttons in order to interact with the app.

With Facebook Messenger, I can just type “Send $200 to Jack Nielson” in a message to my bank. By looking at my list of payees, my bank will know who Jack Nielson is (if it doesn’t know, it can ask for more information) and which account the money is coming from (if it can’t decide, it can ask again). Of course, some technologies must be built to make sure that the correct action is taken upon receiving a user’s message, but such programming challenges will easily be overcome over time.

Chat bot applications for banking

Thanks to mobile banking and online banking, visiting a branch is no longer necessary for day-to-day banking. In fact, many digital banking startups feel there is no need for a branch-based business model and run their whole business on the web and mobile. Chat bots will help banks automate tasks further by making it seamless for the users to submit their inquiries.

Chat bots are also a great tool for the banks to simplify their digital interfaces, while being easier to maintain than an app. To support a new Messenger command (e.g. “what’s my credit card balance?”), there is no need for an app to be developed and published in the App Store. All the bank has to do is to write code that translates the message to a certain set of actions in the back end. Thanks to new solutions such as Facebook’s Artificial Intelligence and Microsoft Bot Platform, turning a message into a request is simple.

Here are some of the immediate applications of chat bots for banking.

Alerts: Chat bots are great tools for delivering alerts to users’ accounts. You can get a quick sense of the experience by subscribing to CNN’s Messenger bot, a great alert tool that sends a summary of news items to subscribers every day. Banks can leverage the alerts capability to enable features such as “send daily account summary” or “low balance alert” for users.

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