Masterpass-Enabled Bots Launch on Messenger

April 19, 2017         By: Mike Dautner

Yesterday, April 18th, I had the pleasure of attending an event at Mastercard to witness a demonstration of their newly launched Masterpass-enabled bots to drive more seamless shopping experiences via the Facebook Messenger platform.

Mastercard has already lined up some pretty impressive names, all which happen to be in the food service industry, that will be enabling the chatbot services for seamless shipping and ordering. The Cheesecake Factory, Subway, and Fresh Direct will now benefit from the Messenger feature driven by Masterpass.

The bots leverage advanced artificial intelligence technologies to enable consumers to interact directly with the merchant brands, build their order and securely checkout via Masterpass, all without ever leaving the Messenger platform. Pretty cool huh?

It’s really no surprise when you consider the decline of phone operated services, and the growing trend of doing things primarily from a smartphone, without ever speaking to another human being. Not sure how great that is for humanity as an entity, but I’m not here to argue the validity of that notion-all I know is that this will put smiles on the customers of these three companies faces.

Masterpass-enabled bots work across multiple verticals, including restaurants to retail, making conversational commerce frictionless while delivering a more personalized experience.

The bots give consumers the ability to engage with brands in new places where they are spending a great deal of time, as messaging apps and platforms like Messenger currently represent many of the top 10 global apps used by billions of people across the globe.

“The Mastercard vision is to support all forms of commerce – addressing the full range of merchant experiences and consumer needs, and ensuring that every one of our accounts is as digital as the people using them. Masterpass-enabled bots on Messenger offer both merchants and consumers innovative, compelling and secure digital payments on an extremely popular and active platform,” said Garry Lyons, Chief Innovation Officer, Mastercard.

The Masterpass team is very excited about this development, and talked about their excitement moving forward-with new verticals to be trail blazed in the near future. Some of these verticals include travel and leisure.

Masterpass-enabled Bots on Messenger Drive Conversational Commerce-Here’s what the experts driving the Messenger service have to say:

  • “We are thrilled to partner with Mastercard to deliver a conversational shopping experience, offering our customers a new option to seamlessly shop for groceries,” said FreshDirect CEO and co-founder, Jason Ackerman. “As a food tech company, it’s our mission to keep fresh at everyone’s fingertips. By harnessing the power of Messenger, we’re able to engage with our customers on a platform that fits their lifestyle and allow them to easily shop FreshDirect as well as collaborate on carts with family and friends.”
  • “Our bot for Messenger, deployed in more than 26,500 U.S. Subway restaurants, is the largest deployment of a Messenger bot in the restaurant industry. We’re proud to offer our guests an innovative new way to order and pay outside the restaurants,” said Carman Wenkoff, Subway’s Chief Information and Digital Officer. “This is a new initiative in the quest to enhance the guest experience.”
  • “The Cheesecake Factory is known for delicious, memorable food and wonderful hospitality, and we are always looking for ways to further enhance our guest experience,” said David Gordon, President of The Cheesecake Factory Incorporated. “Through this commerce-enabled bot we are able to leverage a new engagement channel with our guests. The bot experience delivers the convenience of customizing a gift card through Messenger integrated with Masterpass payment functionality to enable a simplified checkout experience.”

“We are thrilled that Mastercard, in partnership with FreshDirect, Subway and The Cheesecake Factory, now offers Masterpass-enabled bots for use on Messenger. Building automated and AI-driven capabilities like bots to conduct commerce will make it easier than ever to interact with people in new, engaging ways,” said David Marcus, Vice President of Messenger.