Russia's Sberbank is dipping its toes in the conversational commerce marketplace with the launch of an experimental project to test the use of mobile applications across popular social media messaging sites.
The bank has built a multi-functional platform dubbed Sberbank Messenger, which allows users to interact and make financial transactions across thousands of products and services. The bank says the app is designed to leverage the fast growing area of conversational commerce, where consumers can interact with friends, family, businesses and local service providers all in one platform.
Describing the roll out as an "experimental project", Sberbank says it will enable the bank to "explore people’s behavioral patterns within messengers and their preferred user experience using a chat form factor".
Svyatoslav Ostrovsky, head of digital retail banking at Sberbank, says consumers are now spending less time on individually branded apps and more time on social media platforms as their dominant form of communication.
He says: "We believe that in the next five years, the underlying trend in financial technology is a move towards multi-functional trusted platforms, where users can communicate and access a range of services in a single interface and Sberbank Messenger will lead this trend.”