Indian industrialist tycoon Ratan Tata backed Niki.ai has tied up with Kerala-headquartered Federal Bank to launch a virtual assistant in Federal Bank’s smartphone application, a financial daily reported.
Federal Bank confirmed saying that the chatbot will be helping customers to access m-commerce services right within the app, VCCircle reported.
With this integration, the customers can simply perform operations by writing it in the virtual assistant’s chat box like top-up their numbers, book movie tickets and pay their bills. The bills will automatically be charged on the user’s account.
“For payments, the customer need not get redirected to any other platform or take the hassle of loading their digital wallets, the debit happens directly from the federal bank account and the payment is done in a flash,” Sachin Jaiswal, ceo of Niki.ai told ET.
Earlier in June, the startup had raised USD 2 million (about Rs 13 crore) in funding from San Francisco-based fund SAP.iO. It had also partnered up with HDFC Bank in the late-2016 to develop HDFC Bank OnChat that would help their customers to book cabs and do mobile recharges. Cleartrip and OYO Rooms also tied up with the artificial intelligence startup to develop a bot that could handle their bookings.
Bengaluru based Niki.ai is owned and operated by Techbins Solutions Pvt. Ltd. launched back in April 2015 by Sachin Jaiswal, Keshav Prawasi, Nitin Babel and Shishir Modi. The startup had built an AI-powered virtual assistant that lets users order anything and provide information such as cricket scores through chat interface.