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Nilson Report

Issue 1185 | Oct 2020

FEATURED COMPANIES

Companies featured in this issue include:

Headlines from this Issue

Payment Cards in the U.S. Projected

Loyalty Points as an Asset Class

Mondia Pay Direct Carrier Billing

GPS Issuer Processing Platform

GTCR Takes Paya Public

White Label Buy Now, Pay Later from Jifiti

Chat Commerce Platform from Clickatell

WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and WeChat are the three largest messaging apps (chat channels) worldwide. They have more users than Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, the three largest social media networks. Clickatell offers financial services companies including card issuers a chat commerce platform to connect with their customers where they are most active.

Consumers, particularly digital natives, consider websites to be slow and have grown reluctant to download yet another mobile app. Chat channels, which are immediate and convenient, are what interests them.

Conversational commerce powered by artificial intelligence (AI) has been available for about three years. However, because that chatbot-based communication operates within an AI-centric approach, Clickatell contends its Convenience Commerce in Chat platform, which provides app-like functionality without the need for a download, is more convenient for consumers because it allows for structured (menus and buttons) as well as unstructured (free-form text) engagement in real time.

Through notifications in the chat channel used by the consumer, Clickatell can facilitate not only click-to-chat messages for customer service, product recommendation, and other functions, but also click-to-pay messages to facilitate immediate purchases. The platform can initiate a text message—“click to start your chat”—in real time to any phone.

Messaging apps let brands connect with the consumer in the same channel used by their friends and family. The Clickatell chat commerce platform is agnostic to the consumer’s preferred chat channel. It can handle a complete customer self-service transaction. Traditional commerce often requires consumers to move among email, web, and phone channels to accomplish, for example, paying a phone bill.

Clickatell can take an existing portfolio of mobile and/or internet banking customers and turn them into convenience chat channel customers in five to six weeks. All transactions on the Clickatell chat platform are encrypted.

When it onboards a consumer using the platform’s Connect module, Clickatell can deploy its Card Concierge service to activate new card accounts using a QR code scan. That process allows banks to communicate with its customers in a chat channel using Clickatell’s Touch module, a bot-driven interactive communication function.

Bill payment is a top feature of the Commerce module in Clickatell’s technology. Absa bank in South Africa makes that service available to its credit and debit card customers. Clickatell facilitates over 30 million payment transactions every month from consumers in various chat channels.

The chat channel offers the promise of giving a payment card an awareness akin to Apple Pay wallets and an equivalent prominent position in its customer’s address book.

Clickatell, which has offices in four countries, handles over 10 billion chat and messaging interactions annually on behalf of over 15,000 clients worldwide. It can deliver messages to over 85% of the world’s population.

INTERVIEWED FOR THIS ARTICLE

Pieter de Villiers is Chief Executive Officer at Clickatell in Cape Town, South Africa, pieter.devilliers@clickatell.com, www.clickatell.com.

Prior issues: 970, 932, 897