From Monday (8), Banco do Brasil (BB) will allow its customers to join Open Finance via WhatsApp, which is unprecedented in the world, which already includes advanced countries in the “open financial system”, such as the United Kingdom and Australia, as well as the Union European. With the tool’s launch today, customers will be able to go through the entire journey of agreeing to share data from other accounts with BB through the messaging app.
According to the bank, the customer will be able to type in terms like “Open Finance” on WhatsApp and the whole process will take place without human interaction. Sharing customer data, done with consent, is a pillar of the Open Finance process, as it allows banks and other participants to gain more details of a customer’s ‘financial life’, enabling more personalized product and service offerings.
The head of BB, Fausto Ribeiro, highlights “Providing consent on WhatsApp is a way to provide more convenience to customers in a channel that is increasingly being used on a daily basis to carry out various transactions.”
According to Ribeiro, among customers who have allowed data to be shared with the bank, 90% have already benefited from some benefit. Of those, 77% received personalized offers based on data and/or solutions used that use Open Finance data, such as a credit limit review or card upgrade, and 13% had their registration information updated without the need to provide documents or attend the agency.
BB recently announced that it already manages over R$7 billion in pooled balances with other banks on its in-app financial planning platform, within the scope of Open Finance. The platform has already made savings recommendations of around R$2.5 billion to customers.
The functionality launched on Monday is part of a suite of innovations that BB has designed for WhatsApp. The bank was also the first to take the full Pix journey into the messaging app, to offer debt renegotiation without human interaction and have a dedicated corporate virtual assistant. In Open Finance, BB was also the first large bank that was enabled to act as a payment initiator.
