Does Facebook want to be a Bank???
An interesting combination of “M” which is Facebook’s personal assistant (AI) with Facebook payments platform.
The idea goes like this- whenever “M” will identify a “need” of the user to do a payment (by finding relevant keywords), it will suggest that the customer use the payments option.
A lot has been said about GAFA giants (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) trying to replace the traditional banks, and again it might seem. As though, this is Facebook’s strategy regarding this industry.
Attached is a link to an interview with Kahina Van Dyke, Facebook’s global director of commerce and payment partnerships.
Kahina said that people have financial moments every day and people are also using Facebook platform every day — so it makes sense to combine those facts together.
Facebook platform allows small business for example to create a business page (as a substitute for building a website) and for the customers to search for product. That’s why it sounds super natural to allow users to pay for services at the same place.
“Only those who were not bankers want to be a bank”
She said that Facebook doesn’t want to replace banks. Their strategy is partnership.
They have the platform and they want to have the options (like payments infrastructure ) and then to enable whatever the customer needs in their platform.
“Leveraging the banking infrastructure”
Facebook wants to leverage the banking infrastructure and the example for this is that the payments are being done from one debit card to another (bank’s debit cards).
And I say “embrace those companies and learn your opportunities”
No matter what will happen Next from Facebook side regarding the financial industry.
This move and the things that were said in the interview just empowers the fact that traditional companies and institutes should see the new players and even the “giants” as an opportunity and to leverage the options for corporation.
For those of you who want to watch the full interview — here is a direct link:
http://bankinnovation.net/2017/04/facebooks-ai-to-boost-p2p-still-through-existing-rails-video/
