China Merchants Bank Tries Deeper Integration with WeChat

Tencent said earlier last week that they wanted the official accounts platform at WeChat to become more than just a marketing tool but a channel to help more companies to better reveal their values (in Chinese). What does that mean? Here’s one of the case studies the company showed on its platform page we thought you might be interested in.

Back in late 2012 China Merchants Bank (CMB)  started the talk with Wechat team on deeper integration. “The partnership was quite in depth, we even transfer our data through DNN, not just via the Internet, ” said the CMB credit cards staff. Since this partnership involves financial services, WeChat even had some customized APIs made.

The service “CMB Micro-customer Service” was finally launched in March this year, in which each card holder’s information binds to his or her WeChat account. The menus at the bottom of the account interface allow users to check their bills, credits, limits or transaction records. This new service, obviously,  has replaced the functions of SMSs to inform card holders of different payment records or information related. Before most banks including CMB would send SMSs to card holders as a reminder after each payment, and now all these things can be realized over the official accounts, which saves the bank lots of money. Surely this is not the point but “to provide more service to card holders” is the ultimate goal according to CMB.

Currently two more features have been in trial, one is the voice-text service, which recognizes users’ voice and automatically executed the task like checking the credits, etc. The other one accordingly is an LBS-focused service which helps users better access the real-time discount information of the merchants closest to them.