As a fan of banks – I like the lollipops they give out – I’m slightly disturbed by services like TalkBank. This Russian company replaces one-on-one teller interaction with a chatbot that can tell you your balance, offer on the spot advice, and even send you cool deals related to your credit cards.
Founded by Mikhail Popov, Alexander Popov, and Vladimir Kozhevnikov the company has about 1,000 active cardholders after starting out in October 2016. They have over six years of experience in fintech and founded EasyFinance, a Russian lending system. They’ve raised a pre-seed round with the Internet Initiatives Development Fund.
“We bring banking to messengers,” said Popov. “There is no need for mobile banking apps, offices, and call-centers. We apply robots to all operations and communication to clients.”
“We thought of building a bank that is conversational, intelligent, intuitive and available any time anywhere. We use Natural Language Understanding to interact, and technologies of AI and BigData to make financial decisions fit every individual need.”
Obviously services like TalkBank aren’t going to replace all financial services but given the move by Quicken into instant mortgage systems and the movement of most banking services online, a service like TalkBank makes perfect sense. The team is building it out right now but it looks promising and if they can solve the lollipop problem I’m in.