Several Founders, Co-Founders, CXO Bankers, CXO Fintech professional & people who participated in the ePanel discussions:
- Mr. Kamonasish Aayush Mazumdar, Founder & CEO at Foodieverse
- Mr. Ajay B Panicker, CEO & Founder, NetPay Limited
- Mr. Rana Sinha Ray, Head Technology, TimesofMoney
- Mr. Anupam Varghese, Chief Tinkerer, Tinkerbee Innovations
- Mr. Shashank Chowdhury, Former Executive Vice President – Vakrangee Software Ltd.
- Mr. Sandeep Todi, Co-Founder & CBO, Remitr
- Mr. Jayesh Shah, CEO, Prism Cybersoft Private Ltd
- Mr. Vineet Tewari, Director, Crescent Payments Private Limited
- Mr. Hemal Shah, former Technical Product Manager, Mastercard
- Mr. Vikas R Panditrao, Co-Founder, Forum of Industry and Academic Knowledge Sharing (FIAKS)
- Many other CEO/CXO Bankers & Fintech professionals on FIAKS Forum requested to remain anonymous
Do you see mobile apps nearing extinction with chatting based applications taking over? For eg- Instead of downloading and using the mobile app of say Vodafone to pay the bills a person can chat on WhatsApp and just pay the bill. That’s so easy, Isn’t it?
So this time the question amongst FIAKS community discussions was What’s the future of mobile-based application?
Let’s see what the community members have got to say;
- A member says, “I think, it will be again not a single interface, the app may be a point for all, however, if Vodafone payment, will route it to that page and accordingly all. So if this is the case it will equal using the Vodafone app, what new would be there?”.
- It’s an oversimplification to say that one app interface would eliminate all else. For some time, the web browser was considered the ultimate app container. The chat interface is another such interface in vogue now. Voice is emerging as a strong contender while neural interfaces are considered the way of the future.
- Each human-computer interface has its strengths and weaknesses. A native app, for now, has the advantage of being the most feature-rich since it essentially represents the superset of all that individual interfaces can achieve.
- Interfacing is not a product, product is standardized solutions at scale. The other name for this problem here is called the mistaking feature for a product. P2P / C2C chat is a product, P2M C2M chat is a feature
- A member says, “I am actually waiting for the day when I’ll be able to type ‘pay my Vodafone bills’ and I will get a confirmation that it is paid, rather like the Google search screen!”
- Another member mentions, “innovating on just the form factor doesn’t solve for anything in my opinion. Enablement and Aggregation are what they targetted for, I think. I guess the point here should be contextual and personalized?”
Here’s what FIAKS community intellectual talks on the extinction of mobile apps;
- The mobile app will not go pager way but will hit the stagnation like cards. The mobile app will become outdated technology. Most of the transaction that is today done by mobile app will be easily replicated by text messages
- Let’s list down the typical transaction into the customer account- Salary credit, Payments- P2P, P2M, Bill payment, local shopping like grocery, vegetables buying – cash, EMI payments, maintenance bill of society, medical bills if any, restaurant bills – credit cards, petrol or diesel, Shopping- credit cards.
- All the above use cases (except credit card and cash) can be better experienced on text messages. All pay now buy now transactions that were done through debit or mobile apps will move to text-based.
- Higher middle class and rich class will continue to be serviced by banks. Millennials love texting and they can shift easily from mobile apps. So which customer segment are these mobile apps going to target?
Can chatbots be considered?
- Chatbots are easy to start with, however can’t trust data security, especially if thinking of payments. Chats bots are good for product information or question/answers.
- But it is to be noted that chatbots only works when the underlying logic for the products are already pre-baked.
- Bots are yet to be smart enough to be able to replace user experiences that can be delivered over the web or app. But as mobile browsers get smarter and more powerful, native apps will make way for the mobile web app, much like the thick clients of yore got replaced by smarter and feature-rich web clients.
- Chatbots are great at simple repetitive tasks but fail miserably at the slightest variations. Besides, most chatbot implementations eventually take you to a scaled-down web page where you enter data as you would normally put in a web form or app page.
- So it is not really a chat interface but another channel to invoke the same underlying services that serve the web sites and the apps.
- Alexa and Siri probably do a better job than chatbots but that is largely because most of the information required to enable the execution of the instruction is already captured by the app or the website and the voice bots are interpreting and executing.
- Once everything is captured across the known civilization in the cloud, and everyone is in digital currency or has every attribute digitized, maybe bots will be great.
- Maybe then Bots will also be obsolete and bionic chips will read your mind and thoughts and execute. Realms of Sci-Fi, but they do become a reality after a period of time.
Today for every use case a mobile app is made. Why do we need so many mobile apps when texting messages can solve it? REGISTER and READ the complete discussions