MasterCard bot for banks will be first available on Facebook Messenger

MasterCard is developing bots for both its merchant and bank partners, which will use chat, messaging and natural language interfaces to communicate with consumers.

The MasterCard bot for banks, MasterCard KAI, will seamlessly extend services to customers on messaging platforms and make financial information and decisions part of consumers’ everyday lives. In this testing phase on Messenger, MasterCard is partnering with Kasisto, the company that created KAI Banking, the conversational artificial intelligence (AI) platform, to power branded virtual assistants and smart bots for financial services and is a current participant in the MasterCard Start Path Global program.

More than that, starting early next year, consumers based in the US can ask the bot questions about their accounts, review purchase history, monitor spending levels, learn about MasterCard cardholder benefits, receive contextual offers through integration with MasterCard Priceless experiences, and get help with financial literacy.

Currently in pilot testing on Messenger, MasterCard KAI will eventually roll out to the 1 billion people who use Messenger every month.

With the MasterCard bot for merchants, consumers will be able to shop and transact on messaging platforms and then check out with the Masterpass global digital payment service. Developed by MasterCard Labs, the bot enables consumers to start a simple conversation with a merchant and complete a transaction without opening their wallets, visiting the merchant’s app or waiting in line. The bot works across multiple verticals – from airlines to retail – and runs on various messaging platforms, making commerce more frictionless than ever before.

To accelerate development of conversational commerce among merchant partners, MasterCard plans to open up its experimental Bot Commerce API on MasterCard Developers platform later this year. Merchants can use this API in a sandbox to begin testing chatbots powered by Masterpass.