There are plenty of excuses for not paying your bills, but now, inconvenience just can’t be one of them (at least, in terms of the actual process). It’s all thanks to BillHero, a Colorado-based fintech company that has created the first chatbot for Facebook Messenger that helps you pay your bills. Simply ask the bot to add new bills or pay existing ones, and you’ll find that behaving like a responsible adult is as easy as sending a Facebook message to a friend.
It’s the latest bot to enter the Facebook space, with a growing number of companies offering various functionalities within Messenger. But no one else is currently giving you the option to actually pay your bills. “We’re always pushing BillHero to be more convenient and simple to use,” said BillHero’s CEO, Dan Holt. “With millennials as our main users, it makes sense to give them an easy, secure way to pay their bills — right from their most used social platform.”
Because BillHero is bank-agnostic, you can pay any one of your bills with any one of your accounts, or a debit or credit card. Moreover, BillHero’s team of banking security experts have ensured that the company already subscribes to bank-grade measures, so you shouldn’t have to worry about your security. Exclusively non-sensitive information is collected by way of the Facebook chat (like the last four digits of a credit card), and every time you begin a new chat session, BillHero will require a one-time authentication code to authorize the Messenger thread.
“As our development team continues to bring this bill pay bot feature to fruition, we’re being cognizant of the security measures needed to safeguard our users’ data,” said Kelly McDuffie, director of engineering. “We look forward to continuing our work with the Messenger team at Facebook to take advantage of enhanced security features and new functionality to our bot that will make for an optimal user experience.”
