The First Ukrainian International Bank (PUMB), belonging to Rinat Akhmetov’s banking group, started providing the banking services through Telegram messenger, Chairman of PUMB’s Board Sergey Chernenko stated, HB reports quoting Interfax-Ukraine.
“Everything that was done on the Viber platform is now available in Telegram. We spent only two days trying to repeat all our functionality in the new messenger for us”, he said.
By the yearend, PUMB also intends to launch the service in Facebook messenger, since it is the third most popular in Ukraine.
The bank implemented a solution for working with banking services in messengers, based on the Corezoid cloud operating system, owned by the American company Middleware Inc. (also works with Privat24).
In the messengers, the customers can find out the current exchange rate, issue a credit and debit card, make repayment through credit card, get information about the movement of funds, as well as replenish the mobile account.
In the last three months of providing banking services in Viber, the Checking Loan Details service was the most popular - 85 thousand requests; on the second place - Checking Credit Card Information - 19 thousand; in third place - 8 thousand requests for exchange rates. Also, the users made about 1.5 thousand replenishments of their mobile accounts via their instant messenger and submitted about 1.2 thousand applications for obtaining a loan or a credit card.
Chernenko also noted that according to PUMB, in Ukraine, the share of the population using smartphones is 45%, out of which 49% use instant messengers. The top 5 messengers in Ukraine include: Viber, used by 85% of the smartphone owners; Facebook messenger - 44%; Skype - 32%; WhatsApp - 20% and Telegram with a user share of 11%.
PUMB was founded in 1991. In early January 2018, Rinat Akhmetov was the owner of the bank’s major shareholding (99.9% indirect shareholding).
According to the National Bank of Ukraine, as of January 1, 2018, PUMB was ranked 9th in terms of total assets (UAH 54.6 billion) among 84 banks operating in the country.
