Mastercard Enables Chatbots For Merchants And Banks
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
Chatbots will help engage customers and deliver compelling, personalized experiences.
Nearly $2 billion in online sales will be completed through mobile digital assistants by the end of 2016, according to Gartner research. To capitalize on this trend, Mastercard has announced that it will launch artificial intelligence technology in bots that allow consumers to shop via messaging platforms, manage finances and perform other transactions. The chatbot technology will help engage customers and deliver compelling, personalized experiences from merchants and banks.
The announcement came as part of the Money 20/20 event.
As part of the new offerings, Mastercard will enable one chatbot for merchants and another for banks, both developed by Mastercard Labs. By initiating a conversation with the merchant chatbot, consumers will have the ability to shop and process transactions on messaging platforms, and check out with the Masterpass digital wallet.
“We’re excited to partner with Mastercard to help drive conversational commerce and engage with consumers where they spend their digital lives – on messaging platforms,” said Zor Gorelov, CEO and co-founder, Kasisto. “This bot enables entirely new experiences, bringing Mastercard benefits and offers to consumers with human-like conversations that are personal and contextual. We’re powering conversational commerce, anytime, anywhere – just as consumers have come to expect.”
Mastercard also plans to open up its BotCommerce API through its Mastercard Developers platform later this year, which will allow merchants to begin testing their own chatbots powered by Masterpass in a sandbox environment.
To accelerate development of conversational commerce among merchant partners, Mastercard plans to open up its experimental Bot Commerce API on Mastercard Developers platform later this year. Merchants can use this API in a sandbox to begin testing chatbots powered by Masterpass.
“At Mastercard, we believe that AI-driven conversations between companies and their customers can drive better customer experiences in places and platforms that consumers are already engaging in.,” said Kiki Del Valle, senior vice president, Commerce for Every Device, Mastercard. “Mastercard Labs has been testing integration of key Mastercard products and services within different messaging platforms and we’re thrilled to test Mastercard KAI on Messenger first. We will keep moving this test-and-learn approach to the next phase by developing chatbots that are naturally ingrained into a consumer’s daily life and helps our partners stimulate business interactions that are more conversational.”
According to Business Insider, the integration of chatbot capabilities can help Mastercard and its partners build a larger digital presence while also lowering costs and increasing engagement.