The Rebisco group’s banking arm Asia United Bank (AUB) has unveiled a social and web commerce solution to help merchants, including beleaguered restaurant operators, stay afloat during this coronavirus pandemic by migrating all their processes to digital channels.
AUB has rolled out PayMateBotty, which helps merchants with end-to-end online dine-in and pickup order acceptance, payment processing and order fulfillment.
In a statement, AUB first vice president and head of cards and acquiring business Mags Surtida said PayMate Botty would allow merchants to offer their products in social apps like Facebook through Messenger and a website through a URL that will be created especially for them.
“The premise for rolling out our social and web commerce solution is that businesses should be in the same space as its customers. PayMate Botty only entails a single setup in our back-end and it opens merchants to be in multiple digital stores. We now have Facebook and soon Viber, plus more social apps we will be partnering with in the future,” Surtida said.
There are about 45 million Filipino users who are active on Facebook alone, according to www.statista.com. Each Filipino spends an average of three hours and 53 minutes on social media, higher than the global average of two hours and 24 minutes, based on a study by We Are Social, a socially-led creative agency.
“We want to provide an end-to-end solution for our merchants during this pandemic situation be it for business recovery or business survival. Aside from QR (quick response) payment acceptance, our merchants will soon be able to accept InstaPay/bank payments, further promoting digital payment among consumers in the process,” said Jacob Ng, AUB executive vice president and head of branch banking group.
“PayMate Botty will assist our business owners in adapting to the new delivery, store pickup and dine-in preorder environment, while enjoying valuable automation and process streamlining that will last beyond the time we overcome this virus,” said AUB executive vice president for operations and technology Wilfredo Rodriguez.
“Our AUB PayMate started out as a QR payment acceptance solution but the pandemic has pushed us to innovate even more and deliver better value to our AUB customers by adding a social commerce and web ordering system, and soon InstaPay acceptance,” he said.
AUB PayMate is a payment acceptance solution enabling small, medium and large retail merchants operating in different retail/distribution environment to accept QR and other forms of digital payments. —DORIS DUMLAO-ABADILLA