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Mobile banking has transformed how we interact with our own money. And mobile payments have transformed, well, a lot more. From the way farmers markets operate, to the way friends split dinner, software and apps have revolutionized daily life by updating how money changes hands.
05 Fintech
Messaging, meet money
75% of consumers
regularly open texts from their bank¹
A vault of business cases for using messaging in fintech
Whether you’re in fintech, or you just want to learn from an industry that’s doing it well, here are a few of our favorite industry-specific use cases, each with a your-accountant-would-approve business case:
Identity protection
Two-factor authentication texts help keep accounts secure and prevent identity theft.
Faster security responses
Account notification texts let customers more easily monitor their accounts for suspicious activity and stop breaches more quickly.
Account balance alerts
These alerts help customers monitor their finances and avoid overdraft fees.
Better record keeping
Transaction receipts at point-of-sale allow both merchants and end users to see and track transactions in real time.
Better customer service
Two-way SMS allows for customers and agents at financial institutions to communicate more easily, cutting out the frustration of waiting on hold, and allowing agents to pull up needed details asynchronously.
Customer retention
When merchants can message their customers, they can answer questions, share helpful instructions, create welcoming experiences, and offer appropriate cross-sell and up-sell offers.
Messaging is where customer convenience and security meet
Texting marries two sides of the business: security, and customer experience. It has potential to help information security and user experience teams align on shared goals.
MEA Financial is a software company serving nearly a thousand banks and financial institutions across the U.S. and texting is a key part of their product suite.
Customers come to them at all stages of their messaging maturity and types of use cases. MEA focuses on making sure they have easy access to numbers so they can set their customers up for success.
Two key focuses for MEA:
- Finding sufficient support: Not all messaging providers have dependable support teams ready to answer questions around the clock and do the necessary investigative work to provide real answers.
- Streamlining providers: MEA wanted to simplify their vendor list and find a provider that offered both voice and text services.
It’s not just 1-way alerts anymore
One of the biggest players in payment services recently implemented 2-way SMS as an option for merchants to have their agents exchanging SMS directly with customers. They found it was their fastest adopted service, EVER.
Companies are champing at the bit to use 2-way messaging because it works and it makes agents more efficient and makes users a lot happier. And it makes sense. Which would you prefer? Waiting on hold to speak to someone? Or texting back and forth while you’re also folding laundry, feeding kids, or answering work emails on the train? Texting for the win, again.
1. Bandwidth customer survey