EarlySalary, Niki.ai introduce new 'Shopping Chatbot' with pay-later option

EarlySalary, India's first FinTech start-up to offer Instant Salary Advances and Short terms loans has tied up with India's leading Artificial Intelligence firm Niki.ai, to offer its customers a simple and easy to use chat bot to shop for products and services whilst using the EMI option.

EarlySalary and Niki.ai will help in simplifying the shopping experience by permitting the whole ordering process on chat itself. This collaboration will not only result in a hassle free experience, but will also allow users to opt for the pay later facility while picking services like - mobile phone recharge, cab booking, utility bills, laundry, hotel bookings, making party bookings, etc. Moreover, this partnership will also eliminate the need for downloading multiple e-commerce apps by providing a smart one-stop-shop for ones needs.

'Niki' developed by a group of four IIT graduates, is an artificial intelligence based bot that works as a smart personal assistant. The user interface is quite simple and intuitive. The conversations between the user and bot are prompt and in real time which don't require any human intervention. This makes Niki the only fully automated bot to handle end-to-end transactions.

Given the high rate of internet penetration, shopping apps are becoming a new-age trend in India. Besides, demonetization has led to an increase in the number of users shopping online and over two million young Indians are now buying products and services online.

Also, as per a recent survey by Criteo - the performance marketing technology company, about 74 per cent of Indian mobile users have installed two to five shopping apps on their smartphones. The survey further divulged that about 80 percent of the online shoppers now find mobile shopping more secure. A conversational interface only makes it easier, since everyone is already habitual to using messaging apps today.

"We see a good benefit in using artificial intelligence for intuitive customer interaction and lending. At EarlySalary we aim to position ourselves as the first line of credit for the young working Indians, hence partnerships like these take us one step closer to this goal," said co-founder and CEO at EarlySalary, Akshay Mehrotra.

"This partnership revolutionizes the shopping experience for Indian customers. They can now simply chat with Niki for various services like they do on a messaging app and pay later using EarlySalary credit. With a very simple SDK integration, all the 20+ commerce services of Niki are now available within the EarlySalary app environment. Moreover, the experience of transacting over simple conversations is ideal for the EarlySalary customer, would lead to an increase in customer satisfaction, repeats, retention, and increased revenues for our partner. This is just a beginning of the partnership for the 2 AI firms, and we hope to create a much bigger success story with EarlySalary in the time to come," said CEO at Niki.ai, Sachin Jaiswal.

EarlySalary as a company has always tried to use technology in a way that helps in providing the best possible experience to its customers.