PayKey integrates investment and loan services on mobile keyboards
PayKey, an Israeli fintech start-up whose clients include Standard Chartered, UniCredit, HSBC and ING, has launched an investment and loan integration for mobile keyboards.
Those banks’ customers can now sell and buy stocks through their keyboards. As well as view “a live investment tracker”, “real-time news feed”, and manage their portfolio.
“Investments and personal financing are just the beginning”, says CEO
As for credit, users can also view financing options, request a loan amount, and define their preferred repayment period.
How PayKey works
The messaging app-based banking provider has already rolled simple checking features, including managing balances, sending money and paying bills.
PayKey’s solutions are messaging app agnostic. That’s because they’re integrated into the phone’s keyboard itself. Whilst other players in the space – like French digital challenger Zelf – partner with individual social media providers to deliver the service.
Its new features allow bank customers to manage investments and apply for loans all through their keyboard. By tapping the bank’s logo on their keyboard – the form the pre-downloaded integration takes – customers can open up their banking, investment and loan options.
“Embedded solutions like PayKey’s keyboard are vital to helping banks engage with customers at the right time,” says Sheila Kagan, the fintech’s CEO.
“Investments and personal financing are just the beginning”, Kagan adds, pointing to further features in the pipeline.
The trend of social banking
In August last year, Standard Chartered’s Korean banking arm partnered with Israeli fintech PayKey to embed banking into consumers’ keyboards.
Then in October a Tokyo-based messenger service, Line, integrated banking into its app. Thailand was its first market.
In all, Line has some 84 million monthly active users, according to Statista which span Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, Cambodia and Turkmenistan – as well as Thailand.
The same month, Russia’s Tinkoff launched a financial messenger service in its banking app. It married the two services together in the opposite order to boost its ‘super app’ status.
Such software tackles a huge problem facing banks. That is, customers uninstalling their app within the first 30 days of download.
“Revolut requires a 350+ MB app to do banking and uses DHL to ship its cards – we eliminate this waste,” founder and CEO of Zelf, Elliot Goykhman, told FinTech Futures in April.
Asked whether he thinks people will be hesitant about doing all their banking through a messaging app, Goykhman pointed out how people already use these apps.
“People already trust these apps to discuss their private lives and send naked pictures. So it’s not as big of a leap as people in the industry might think,” he said.
Read next: Line launches messenger-based banking platform in Thailand
