Facebook will join forces with the international money transfer service TransferWise Ltd. which will allow you to set up foreign exchange transactions via Messenger. The TransferWise launches a piece of automation software that comprehends the natural language or a bot that is codeveloped with Messenger. The bot will help users with the entire process of arranging an international money transfer with TransferWise, and this will not have any effects on the prices or rates that are offered.
The people can also find out when a particular foreign exchange rate reaches a certain level by setting alerts that will notify them. The London-based TransferWise confirmed that the service will be available for payments to and from Europe, UK, Canada, US, and Australia. Later, the company should make the service available in more than 50 states.
TransferWise joins other foreign exchange and payment companies who are trying to use messaging apps for sending money, which will apparently become the primary e-commerce platform. Some of the companies that already have payment bots on Facebook Messenger are PayPal Holding Inc., Stripe Inc., Visa Inc., American Express Co. and Mastercard Inc., to name a few.
Aurelie L’Hostis, a digital banking strategy analyst at Forrester Research said that banks and payment companies should be more careful. She stated: “If you are buying a pizza and don’t get exactly what you ordered or the chat bot didn’t understand the request, that’s not such a big deal. But the stakes are too high in financial services if the bot doesn’t understand the transaction well.”
Tencent Holdings Ltd. that owns the popular Chinese messaging service called WeChat was the first one to use this kind of payment system. Facebook tries to do the same thing with the Messenger and here is what L’Hostis said: “Facebook is very clearly trying to replicate what Tencent is doing in Asia to make Messenger a platform where customers can do everything.”
According to her, the banks and financial institution focus too much on allowing customers to conduct their transactions using apps that they forgot about safety, privacy and data protection. TransferWise promised the official mid-market exchange rate with low fees, and it has also longed to become the international money transfer backbone for banks.
TransferWise is UK most successful financial technology startup. The company was established in 2010, and Silicon Valley venture capital corporation Andreessen Horowitz backed it up, and so did Valar Ventures Peter Thiel and Scottish asset manager Baillie Gifford.
