Ingenico Group (Euronext: FR0000125346 – ING), the global leader in seamless payment, today announced its investment in Joinedapp, a start-up located in Palo Alto, California whose enterprise e-commerce solutions enable brands and retailers to connect with customers on their preferred mobile messaging apps. Joinedapp’s chatbot technology offers large and SMB merchants a scalable solution to engage, nurture, and monetize audiences across social messaging.

With more than 3 billion users, messaging apps have surpassed social networks as the dominant mobile platforms. As e-mail and social media marketing channels have matured, chatbots are considered to be the next frontier in e-commerce sales and distribution. While chatbots have thus far been limited to certain customer services use cases, Joinedapp’s enhanced AI enables an end-to-end frictionless e-commerce solution known as conversational commerce – consumers engage, browse, and pay – all within a messaging app. Many of the world’s largest retailers are prioritizing the use of chatbots in their e-commerce strategies to drive growth.

“Conversational commerce is part of the innovation strategy of Ingenico Group for the coming years.” said Michel Léger, EVP Innovation at Ingenico Group. “By embedding payments directly into bots, merchants remove conversion-killing steps from the purchase process and enable a seamless consumer experience. We are also convinced that Joinedapp’s channel-agnostic platform is a key market differentiator with a very high potential for merchants.”

When Ingenico Group and Joinedapp first met a few months ago, both were investigating the application of artificial intelligence technologies to increase sales conversion. Recognizing that a seamless checkout experience within messaging platforms could drive higher conversion rates and incremental sales, the two quickly entered a partnership to develop a fully integrated payment solution. Embedded into messaging bots, this solution leverages Ingenico ePayments’ Connect technology and its full portfolio of international and alternative payment methods. It removes the need for the consumer to leave the messaging app to complete a purchase. Furthermore, as it is compliant with all major messaging apps – including Facebook Messenger, Line, Telegram, Kik, Skype, Slack and WeChat, this solution allows merchants to create their messaging bot user experience once and deploy it across all networks.

Arash Hassibi, CEO & Founder of Joinedapp, noted: “We’re empowering many of the world’s largest retailers and brands to connect, engage, and convert customers across the world’s most popular messaging platforms. Ingenico Group’s partnership will allow us to strengthen our unique value proposition and develop new use cases across more verticals.”

By leading the Seed funding round of Joinedapp and therefore supporting its capacity for growth, Ingenico intends to deepen their partnership as well as accelerate research and joint projects.