If your business could talk to you, what would it say? Help me! I’m not healthy! I need cash to fuel my growth! In 2016, we are experiencing a Cambrian explosion of chatbot applications and a shift to conversational commerce. Although the idea of automating customer interactions has been around for decades, technology advancements are improving the usefulness of these applications. At tomato pay (formerly known as Fractal), we believe these chatbots will be transformative in the way our customers interact with their financial information. That’s why we launched the automated financial assistant for businesses in the form of a bot which is accessed via your mobile browser. Ask tomato pay some financial questions about your company’s performance using your mobile device! Application interfaces are becoming increasingly conversational because humans are social animals. Ever since the advent of SMS, we have become accustomed to communicating using a chat format on mobile. Improvements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology coupled with the availability of relevant data sets has spurred the growth of the conversational interface. Conversational interfaces are set to impact the financial sector by facilitating communication and personalisation. As a business manager, the financial chatbot mimics the experience you would traditionally have with your financial advisor. It helps you interpret the health of your business; by discussing performance, highlighting trends, and presenting strategic options for you to consider. Good conversational chatbots enhance the software’s ability to understand context. In turn, the software becomes better at predicting behaviours and proactively helping customers find the right information at the right time. We don’t recommend firing your financial advisor. Machine intelligence has become better at predicting outcomes, but has not replaced the value of experienced human judgement. While messaging bots may not replace your advisor, they represent a significant evolution in automation and communication. We recommend that you and your financial advisor have your next meeting on-the-move via the Fractal financial communication platform. Go ahead, ask your business if it’s healthy, growing and feeling efficient. It might just answer you.

Despite spending over 40 years in academia, being the recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Sciences and writing several books, Richard Thaler usually summarises his expert advice into three words: Make it easy.

Throughout time, women have had to overcome and fight many injustices stemming from societal perceptions of gender. Although there have been improvements over the past few centuries in the public, private and social sectors, we’re still a long way off from being a gender-balanced society.

tomato pay (formerly known as Fractal) is part of cohort 5 of the FCA Regulatory Sandbox We are pleased to announce that we have been accepted into cohort 5 of the FCA Regulatory Sandbox to further test our innovative solution for financial institutions and their small business clients.

We are excited to announce that Deloitte has invested in the tomato pay team to help us further our mission to revolutionise the financial services experience small businesses get today.

The importance of Fintech Week If you didn’t work in the financial services industry, would you know what Fintech Week is and what it aims to do?

tomato pay is attending the Open Banking World Congress 2019 We’re excited to be speaking alongside Jonathan Holman, Santander’s Transformation Director, at the highly-anticipated Open Banking World Congress in two weeks (7th-8th May). Throughout our discussion, we will show, first-hand, the challenges real small businesses face and how we are fixing the banking experience for them through artificial intelligence, machine learning and APIs. We will talk about the current models and user experiences big tech companies use - for example, Netflix's 'the next show to watch' model and Amazon's 'the next product to buy' model, and how that can be implemented within the finance industry to give small businesses a better, more personalised banking experience. Event organiser and host, Marie Walker, hopes that leaders within the finance and technology industry will accelerate new finance propositions and business models to deliver real value to the finance ecosystem at this year’s Open Banking World Congress. Watch tomato pay CEO and Co-founder, Nicholas Heller, and Santander Transformation Director, Jonathan Holman speak at what sets to be a fascinating event on the 8th May at 2.05pm at Houndsditch, London. You can also see our previous thoughts on Open Banking in our previous blog here.

We are delighted to announce that tomato pay has been selected to join the prestigious UK-Australia Fintech Bridge initiative

As said in Quartz, “Over time, having women in powerful positions—placing bets on women and taking meetings with women founders who might never have gotten through the door at male-dominated firms—could radically transform the industry”.

If you were a citizen of the Roman Republic 2000 years ago, March would have been a busy month for you.

City AM reported that the investment into the UK’s artificial intelligence (AI) sector from venture capital firms reached a record $1.3bn (£998m) last year, almost as much as the rest of Europe combined.

It’s not every day that you’re invited to have dinner at the British Ambassador’s house at The Hague, Netherlands to discuss solutions to fix the small business banking problem and why it even exists in the first place.

Over the past 12 months, we have been fortunate enough to visit nearly every continent in the world (closing the small business funding gap in Antarctica, anyone?).

Happy first birthday, Open Banking!