Facebook Messenger wants to offer chats with banks

Author: Thomas Wandler
Date: 08.08.2018

Users should be able to handle questions and transactions via messenger

Facebook has developed a new business idea. Users of the social network messenger should be able to arrange questions and transactions with the bank via chat. By this, Facebook wants to strengthen its Messenger, which has currently about 1.3 billion users.

In the course of this, Facebook has already inquired about customer data at several US banks. Facebook specifically asked for information such as account balance, transactions and places where customers have shopped according to the “Wall Street Journal”. The company invokes on the consent of persons who are familiar with the process. There was no statement from Facebook that sensitive customer data were handled.

“The idea is that chatting with your bank can be better than being on hold on the phone,” said Facebook. Furthermore, it was stressed that the data will not be used for targeted ads via the messenger and will not be shared with third parties.

The Banks JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and US Bancorp, which Facebook requested, did not respond positively to the new business idea. JPMorgan has already given Facebook a clear refusal and does not want to share transaction data “with these platforms”.

Facebook is still feeling the after-effects of the data scandal due to the inappropriate transfer of user data to the analytics company Cambridge Analytica. They evaluated the data for the election campaign of US President Trump. This affected around 87 million Facebook users worldwide.