WhatsApp Banking: Guide to Conversational Automation in Finance

Chatbots and conversational automation started as hype in most industries. However, today, the trend earns a space among the top most effective business growth strategies, banking and finance notwithstanding.

While automated conversations make up the core of this approach, messaging apps like WhatsApp are the unstoppable driver behind the growing adoption. WhatsApp banking is transforming the way financial institutions, fintech professionals, and developers approach customer-related operations, offering a real business advantage. 

Given WhatsApp’s growth — it’s nearing 3 billion active users worldwide — its global reach and business potential can’t be ignored. 

In this article, we explore how WhatsApp is changing the conversational banking space, its benefits, and the most effective ways to use WhatsApp in the financial sector.

What is WhatsApp Banking?

WhatsApp banking enables banks and other financial institutions to serve and interact with their customers on the WhatsApp messaging app. This can be achieved through live chat interactions or automated messages delivered via a WhatsApp chatbot, providing a familiar and convenient environment for users.

Financial business professionals and developers can leverage the WhatsApp Business API to integrate their financial services with the messaging platform. This integration allows for the creation of automated workflows — such as answering FAQs or sending WhatsApp Broadcasts — that facilitate operations such as account inquiries, transaction processing, customer support, and lead generation. 

For example, a financial institution can use a WhatsApp chatbot that’s available 24/7 and allows customers to check their account balance, obtain a settlement quote, make secure payments, and get answers to their frequently asked questions — which was exactly what our client FASTA did and got great results for. 

WhatsApp chatbots for banking can rely on a rule-based conversational flow or be powered by AI. The choice is entirely up to you and what your financial business needs, but both options are sure to help automate and streamline your operations, from lead generation and qualification to customer support.

Why Does WhatsApp Banking Matter Now More Than Ever?

Financial institutions today face significant pain points, including rising customer acquisition costs and high customer churn rates. In the competitive fintech landscape, the pressure is even higher.

According to this report, 73% of new Fintech users churn within the first week. Customer retention plays an important role here, especially considering that Fintech has the highest customer acquisition cost in the SaaS industry, with an average of $1450 per new customer. 

However, competition and customer behavior aren’t the only factors at play here. Today, the financial industry is under the same scrutiny customers direct towards any other eCommerce or brand on the market. Services like Amazon have set the bar of customer service and interaction high and no industry is safe from the growing instant gratification culture. And it’s not just about 24/7 connectivity and availability. 72% of customers claim personalization influences their choice of bank, which means that conversation continuity and recalling past interactions is key to customer acquisition. 

WhatsApp banking addresses all these challenges, as it enables quick and easy interactions with your prospective and existing customers on an app that is already part of their daily routine. 

Every financial business, large or small, faces the same pressures of delivering speed, convenience, and personalization every moment of every day. WhatsApp stands out as the go-to solution not only because it's the most popular messaging app across the globe, but also because it's the market leader for rich conversational experiences and business communication.

How Does WhatsApp Banking Work?

WhatsApp banking is enabled via the WhatsApp Business API, which allows businesses to connect their systems and services with the messaging tool. Using the API, banks and financial institutions can develop their own WhatsApp chatbots for banking to handle a wide range of customer interactions. 

The WhatsApp Business API is key to creating seamless experiences in WhatsApp banking. It facilitates the integration of various banking systems, such as account management, transaction processing, and customer databases, with the WhatsApp platform. This integration also allows for real-time data exchange between WhatsApp and other tools, which ensures accurate and efficient interactions. 

While rule-based WhatsApp chatbots were already game changers for the financial sector, AI-driven chatbots are further transforming customer service in banking. AI technology allows chatbots to understand and interpret customer queries in natural language, providing responses that go beyond the pre-defined script of a rule-based conversational flow. This means that an AI-powered WhatsApp chatbot for banking can handle more complex requests, offer financial advice, and even solve issues altogether without human intervention. The result is faster, more efficient service available 24/7 — exactly what customers expect. 

For businesses looking to implement WhatsApp banking without extensive technical expertise, solutions like Landbot make chatbot building available to anyone. We offer a user-friendly builder with a drag-and-drop functionality, if you want to build your chatbot from scratch, pre-built templates, and an AI Agent that allows you to launch a AI chatbot in just a few clicks.

Benefits of WhatsApp Banking Services

Using WhatsApp banking helps financial institutions deliver a fantastic experience at scale and at all points of the customer journey. Fintech chatbots enable you to keep communications simple, timely, personalized, and consistent.

Let’s dive deeper into each of the benefits.

Reach & Scalability

Bringing communication and services to WhatsApp enables companies to fully take advantage of the messaging app's nearly 3 billion global users. WhatsApp also facilitates seamless scaling via business automation, so that your WhatsApp banking chatbot can grow along with your business needs. 

Security & Trust

Finances are a sensitive topic requiring the highest levels of security. WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption guarantees that only the financial institution and the customer in question can read and access the exchanged messages. Plus, if needed, additional security protocols can be added to the automated script to protect other actions such as payments and transactions, fostering trust among users. 

Efficiency & Streamlined Innovation

WhatsApp banking allows you to increase efficiency through the automation of routine tasks, so your human agents are free to devote time and energy to issues and tasks that require human attention.  

WhatsApp banking via WhatsApp Business API also makes innovation easier and more accessible. Instead of pouring a huge amount of time and resources into building tech products from scratch, financial institutions can streamline the process by partnering with third-party official WhatsApp Business Providers like Landbot that handle the WhatsApp channel setup process for them.

Enhanced Customer Experience

Customer expectations are higher from year to year as consumers expect the same level of immediacy from all businesses, whether they are dealing with their favorite retail brand or a bank. In fact, it's so essential that banks that do invest in optimizing customer experience are reported to grow 3.2x faster than their competitors.

WhatsApp automation helps financial businesses do precisely what’s needed to meet customers where they are. For example, one of our clients, Plum, was able to cut their customers' claim filing time by 60%  with a WhatsApp banking chatbot. 

Increased Customer Loyalty & Revenue

One of the best ways to reduce customer churn is to invest in retention, and to do that, you need loyal customers that stand by your business. As already mentioned, a significant percentage of Fintech customers churn within the first week, which could be easily prevented. In fact, 67% of customer churn is easily preventable if the customer issue is resolved at the first engagement, and a further 11% can be prevented by simple company outreach.

With WhatsApp banking chatbots, you can engage with customers and solve their issues 24/7, while improving company outreach with automated WhatsApp campaigns. 

According to Accenture's Conversational Banking report, conversational banking has the potential to accelerate revenue growth by 25% while reducing costs by up to 30%. So WhatsApp will help you not only reduce churn and maintain customer loyalty, but also increase revenue.

Top WhatsApp Banking Use Cases 

Now that there's no doubt WhatsApp can be a valuable addition to your financial institution, let’s look at all the possible ways you can leverage WhatsApp chatbots for banking throughout the customer journey and lifecycle. 

1. Document Upload & Validation

A huge part of onboarding in finance requires document upload and validation. It's not uncommon for customers to drop off at this stage because the process is either too slow and cumbersome or because they get interrupted. WhatsApp can provide users with both familiarity and continuity.

Most people feel at home with the WhatsApp interface, so uploading and sharing documentation is not an issue. Plus, if the process is interrupted, the conversation stays put, and they can pick up where they left off when it's convenient for them. 

2. Payments and Transfers

Cash is becoming increasingly rare in daily transactions, so most people need a quick way to send and receive funds on the go. WhatsApp banking chatbots can easily enable hassle-free transfers between individuals and businesses. By making their accounts accessible via WhatsApp, paying bills and issuing transaction confirmations are more convenient, faster, and easier to remember. 

3. Lead Generation & Qualification

WhatsApp is an easy way to generate high-quality leads. Adding a simple click-to-WhatsApp feature on your ads or offering an opt-in on your website enables you to collect customer data. As soon as the lead opts in to learn more about your service, you gain their name and phone number, and give them access to a communication channel that consumers do not find annoying. 

After collecting contact details, you can seamlessly move on to the qualification or persuasion stage. A simple message and a short conversation with a WhatsApp bot can help boost your conversion rates substantially. For instance, our sales team used WhatsApp automation for their outreach campaign earning a 90% open rate, 25% engagement, and less than 4 hours response time, as opposed to the email results, which hovered over a 25% open rate, 5% engagement, and a response time over 24 hours.

4. Account Management Services

WhatsApp chatbots for banking and finance can help your customers manage their accounts and facilitate requests such as account balance checks, credit card status, due payments, or transaction history with just a couple of clicks. 

This bot can be a stand-alone feature or part of a more holistic banking assistant.

5. Personalized Financial Advice

WhatsApp is also a great way to offer customers concise and personalized financial advice whenever and wherever they are. 

Institutions can use personal information such as transaction history to analyze spending behavior and offer customized saving insights and calculations, improving customers' financial management skills on the go.

6. Compliance & Analytics Chatbot Workflows

The WhatsApp Business API allows developers to create workflows that streamline compliance monitoring and data analytics. These workflows ensure financial institutions comply with WhatsApp policies and regulations and provide valuable business insights. By building these workflows, financial institutions can ensure regulatory compliance and leverage data analytics to enhance service delivery and operational efficiency.

WhatsApp chatbots for banking do this by automating data collection and integrating with databases for real-time information verification. For data analytics, bots can collect relevant data from customer interactions to identify trends, track their own performance, and improve customer experience and operational efficiency.

7. Notifications & Reminders

Since the majority of users check WhatsApp on a daily basis, spending almost half an hour every day interacting with the app, it's an excellent channel for sending essential notifications.

You can use WhatsApp banking to share news about new services and opportunities and send reminders about automatic payments or outstanding invoices.

8. Customer Feedback Collection

Most banks and financial institutions offer a wide range of products and services, from checking to savings accounts to loans and discounts. Such information overload is often hard to make sense of. A WhatsApp bot can help your customers receive answers to common questions and queries about interest rates, loan opportunities, credit limits, special offers, eligibility, branch or ATM locations, and more. 

This not only serves to resolve queries faster but also frees your human agents from tedious, repetitive tasks so they can focus their attention on cases and queries that genuinely require assistance.

Transform Your Customer Experience with WhatsApp Banking

WhatsApp is becoming one of the top business communication channels across all industries. Banking and financial services are no exception. 

With WhatsApp banking, you can offer instant, secure, and human-like interactions that save time and keep your clients coming back. 

Are you ready to leverage WhatsApp automation and help your business keep up with the future of finance? Check out what Landbot’s WhatsApp solution can do for you!