The initiative will allow consumers and online businesses to engage in social or ‘conversational’ commerce through popular messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger, Skype, Line, Kik, Telegram, WeChat and Slack.

Over 3 billion consumers worldwide have an account with one or more messaging apps, spending increasing amounts of time within these apps. In fact, many millennials use messaging apps as their favorite tool to communicate and engage with the world around them, and are asking their favorite brands to engage with them in the same way. As messaging apps get more and more traction, brands and retailers increasingly look to leverage these apps to reach their customers in a more personal and conversational manner. However, the key challenge remains to convert these engagements into purchases.

By embedding payments directly into bots, merchants remove conversion-killing steps from the purchase process and enable a seamless consumer experience. With this new solution, Ingenico ePayments’ full portfolio of international payment methods and capabilities can now be integrated and embedded inside messaging bots, removing the need to go out of the messaging app to complete a purchase and thus increasing conversion and revenue.

Furthermore, the new solution is linked to all the major messaging apps, including Facebook Messenger, Line, Telegram, Kik, Skype and WeChat. This allows merchants to create their messaging bot user experience once, and deploy it across all networks. Lastly, the platform integrates with the merchants’ existing systems and allows marketers to augment CRM data with messaging data to enable truly holistic customer analytics.

"Our innovation strategy always aims at anticipating new consumer habits as well as removing friction from the payment funnel to boost conversion. Social media and social commerce are definitely trends to watch, and focusing on adding payment into messaging apps seemed unavoidable. Allowing merchants to leverage our full portfolio of payment methods directly from a messaging bot will significantly remove friction from conversational commerce while boosting conversion.” said Michel Léger, executive vice president of Ingenico Labs. “This is also a new demonstration of how digital innovation can speed up the generation of new Ingenico offers.”

"The payment process is the bottleneck in any conversion funnel, and that goes for conversational commerce through messaging apps as well. Remove friction from that process and you widen the funnel, boosting conversion,” explained Pierre-Antoine Vacheron, executive vice president of Ingenico ePayments. “With this new messaging solution, merchants can now easily access our full portfolio of international payment methods directly from any messaging bot, enabling their customers to complete a payment from within the bot without any need for redirects or other steps.”