Now you can trade shares on Facebook Messenger with chatbots
As if Facebook weren't already taking over your life (and the rest of the world), soon, it could be the place where you're trading shares.
An online broker in Britain has revealed that it completed a live share trade using the messaging app – understood to be a world first – and plans to make this widely available over the coming months.
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The first trade too place last month said AJ Bell, the online investment platform backed by Neil Woodford. £500 of shares in Facebook (what else) were bought.
Watch how it works below.
The firm used a chatbot to make the trade. Chatbots use artificial intelligence to automate interactions, and they were introduced as a feature by Facebook just a few months ago.
"We have created a secure authorisation framework between the Facebook Messenger Platform and AJ Bell Youinvest. We have added a further layer of security whilst keeping it easy to login by sending a time-sensitive, one use PIN to the customer's registered mobile phone," said AJ Bell's digital strategy director Tim Huckle.
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“Following some testing we linked our Facebook Messenger bot to our trading platform and at 3.15pm 25 May we bought £500 of Facebook using my live account. In doing so, we believe that we became the first company to complete a live share trade using Facebook Messenger.”
The firm noted the huge growth of messenger apps which also includes the hugely popular Facebook owned WhatsApp.
The applications of chatbots are being explored by companies, with customer service seen as a major use and with news publishers using the technology to reach readers.