Investment Chatbot Finds A Home On Facebook Messenger

Polly Portfolio, the wealth management technology platform for asset managers, is getting into the chatbot game, launching a chatbot for Facebook Messenger this week. The bot, dubbed Polly Chat, is free to use and enables users to have a conversation about financial news. The bot also creates a financial profile and gives users customized trade ideas based on their responses.

“We recently released Polly Chat, the first investment chatbot for Facebook Messenger. Polly Chat engages you in a conversation about recent financial news headlines and prepares a financial profile based on your responses, along with customized portfolios and trade ideas. All free,” the company said in a blog post.

The move on the part of Polly Portfolio comes at a time when Facebook is testing out chatbots that work with SMS or Facebook Messenger but not on an app. Facebook is hoping it catches on with businesses that opt to write code for the bot rather than for Android and Apple devices. It also comes at a time when alternative investment companies, relying on technology, are taking on the traditional banks and investment companies, luring customers who want personalization but don’t want to pay a lot for it.

In its blog post, Polly Portfolio highlighted the fact that Polly Chat is the first chatbot to come out of an investment company. And while the company acknowledged it took hard work to design Polly Chat, hard work isn’t what is stopping investment companies from following Polly in the chatbot area, it argued.

“There is a more fundamental reason we released Polly Chat: it only makes sense to build a chatbot when you have something to chat about. We do,” the company said. “Large financial firms have formidable teams of research analysts, strategists and portfolio managers. They have much to say about important economic developments. But they have not moved fast enough to deliver their knowledge to individual clients in convenient, interactive ways.”