What does the future hold for AI and bill pay in FinTech?


By Dan Holt, Co-Founder and CEO of BillGO

Artificial intelligence (AI) is seemingly taking over the world. We see it mentioned daily in the news – from big names like Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates to tech giants like Google Facebook, Amazon, and IBM. It’s truly transforming the way we live our lives each day, and will continue to impact us in ways that we haven’t yet discovered.

FinTech companies are using AI to personalize more than ever. For example, why not analyze and understand how customers are spending, investing, and making their financial decisions to provide better advice and ultimately improve their lives? Well, it can be trickier than it seems.

For bills specifically, changing variables – like monthly payments amounts or merchant updates or bundling – add another layer of complexity. And these questions, concerns, and changes with our bills are usually the reason why we still end up reaching for the phone. If DirecTV changes the total of your bill, you’re usually not going to know how much it’s changed – or why – until it’s too late (autopay). We’ve all been there.

And a great way to offer this clarity without stripping away that human component mentioned above is through “conversation as a platform.” We’ve all heard of Siri, Cortana, Alexa. Microsoft has been a big player in this space, with its strategy in 2016 focusing on bot development framework. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said, “Human language is the new user interface layer.” The idea of asking a “digital assistant” a question makes AI a little bit more natural and intimate – yet less invasive.

Throughout 2016, we’ve closely followed Mark Zuckerberg’s growing interest in incorporating artificial intelligence into Facebook software and, more specifically, Chatbots. His overall vision of Messenger bots is to increase the speed and efficacy of interactions between users and businesses. This is exactly our direction for BillGO customers when it comes to paying bills.

Back to the idea of personalization: The key to making AI and bill pay work together is giving people full intelligence into what’s going on with their bills. Our end goal with BillGO is to help our users make smarter financial decisions. So the more intel we can offer to them based on their bills, the better. Questions like, “How much did I pay Comcast last year?” and “What was my electric bill this month, last year?” will hopefully be ones we can instantly answer down the road.

The future is really opening up the conversation to something like:

“Your Verizon bill just increased $90. Would you like to A. Renegotiate B. Change or C. You like paying more?”

BillGO plans to continue investing in the future of conversation as a platform to not only improve user experience, but expand opportunities for financial success.

Originally posted on LinkedIn

jeroen bours