BillHero Launches Payment Bot For Facebook Messenger
The chatbot trend shows no sign of slowing down — and now it’s moving into finance.
Colorado-based BillHero announced today the release of its Facebook Messenger chatbot, which handles bill payments via simple messaging communications. The service is an extension of BillHero’s existing mobile app, allowing users to make payments from bank accounts or credit cards. The existing BillHero app can also split bills automatically and collect payment from multiple individuals in a single household.
Other finance bots currently available on Facebook Messenger aggregate information from users’ bank and credit card accounts. Newscenter.io has previously written about a chatbot developed by Kasisto that tracks bank account and credit card activity to help users manage expenses and alert them about payment due dates. BillHero’s new functionality claims to take financial management a step further by using chat to manage payments. “We’re always pushing BillHero to be more convenient and simple to use,” said BillHero’s CEO Dan Holt in a company statement about the launch. “With millennials as our main users, it makes sense to give them an easy, secure way to pay their bills — right from their most used social platform.”
To ensure security, BillHero sends users a one-time authentication code for each conversation thread. Users can choose how they pay their bills using BillHero — from bank accounts or credit cards, for example — but only non-sensitive information such as the last four digits of a credit or debit card is actually pushed through the Facebook Messenger interface.
