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Joining the bots With its chatty AI demo DAISY, software provider Dorsum coined a new phrase – botboarding. Business Development Director Imre Rokob explains why everyone in financial services should be part of the conversation It’s February 2017, and London’s Old Billingsgate Market is playing host to the crème de la crème of the financial world. More than 1,500 financial executives, venture capitalists, fintech entrepreneurs and banking nerds (the Fintech Finance team included) have gathered in the Thameside venue for FinovateEurope 2017 – one of the largest conferences in the financial calendar. In the main hall, not a spare seat is to be found. Industry leaders line the aisles, eagerly awaiting the next presentation. The company which will be delivering it is Dorsum, an award-winning investment software provider, based in Budapest. Like every other company on the Finovate stage, Dorsum will have exactly seven minutes to demonstrate its latest innovations, without the use of slides or pre-recorded video. Dorsum’s business development director, Imre Rokob, greets the crowd in traditional rock ‘n’ roll style (“Hell-lo London!”) before unveiling the company’s new Botboarding as a service (BaaS) platform to aid financial institutions in their customer acquisition. Rokob’s assistant, business development consultant Renata, hooks
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her smartphone up to the screen and as she scrolls through her Facebook newsfeed we see an advert for a credit card. She clicks on it and a chatbot named DAISY offers to help Renata through the card application process. After asking some basic questions about Renata’s shopping habits, and responding in a distinctly unrobotic manner (“You went to Hawaii? Niiice!”), DAISY sends Renata a prototype image of her new card and prompts her to fill in her contact details with the bank to complete the application process. It’s taken precisely two minutes. Fast forward to this summer, and the effects of Dorsum’s presentation are still being felt across the industry. The Hungarian company walked away from Finovate 2017 with the prestigious Best of Show award for its Botboarding platform, which runs on Messenger and helps financial institutions with customer acquisition. Its presentation surpassed those of 72 other companies to win Dorsum the grand prize. Speaking to Fintech Finance three months after the event, Rokob speculates on why his company’s innovation captured the attention of industry leaders so well. “There’s only one avenue that firms should be using to approach customers
and that’s mobile,” says Rokob. “This may sound restrictive, but it really isn’t when you look at the figures. Facebook hosts one billion potential customers, with around 20 per cent of the world’s population having signed up to the social media site. How do the vast majority of these users access the site? On their phones! This makes Facebook an ideal channel through which to approach new customers on their mobiles and our platform allows banks to access these customers without the need to develop a mobile application of their own.”
Changing the conversation Following its success at Finovate, Dorsum was inundated with partnership offers from industry leaders keen on integrating the Botboarding platform within their own products, says Rokob. “We’ve received more than 50 inquiries from different banks and providers, and some previous Best of Show winners, including Backbase, eToro and CREALOGiX, converged on us before we’d even left the conference,” he reveals. “However, we’re determined not to let our recent triumphs go to our heads; there’s so much potential in this technology, and we need to stay focussed on tuning it to Summer 2017