Facebook Messenger adds business-friendly features: Version 2.2 of Facebook's wildly popular Messenger app has arrived, and with it a closed beta version of a new plugin that lets businesses embed Messenger in their websites and talk to customers across multiple channels.
The plugin doesn't have all the features found in the full-fledged Messenger app, but key capabilities such as payments support and rich media are part of the initial version. Facebook has lined up some top brands as beta testers, including Air France, KLM, Argos, Volaris and Zalando.
POV: The plugin reflects the B2C side of Facebook's emerging enterprise strategy. On the B2B end of the spectrum lies Workplace at Facebook, which Constellation VP and principal analyst Alan Lepofsky takes a detailed look at right here.
While there are untold numbers of chat clients available for enterprises to use with their websites, Messenger provides a series of advantages for brands, not the least of which is its ubiquity among customers, with more than 1 billion users around the world.
Customers are already using Messenger in their personal lives to communicate with friends and family; businesses can tap into that activity without having to ask customers to login to a separate chat client or account on their websites. Along with Messenger's cross-platform continuity for message threads, the level of friction for customer service, marketing and sales-related conversations can be reduced dramatically.
QuickBooks enters the SMB direct-lending race: Following the lead of Square, Amazon and other tech companies catering to small business entrepreneurs, Quickbooks has introduced a direct lending service that provides loans of up to $35,000 for qualifying individuals.
Dubbed QuickBooks Capital, the service is embedded within the existing application, and use data about the customer QuickBooks already has, along with machine learning models that leverage its large corpus of user information, to make lending decisions quickly. Funds get transferred within a couple of business days, with the money coming directly from QuickBooks and not a third party, as has been the case in the past.
The loans are for between three and six months, with interest rates ranging from 1.75% to 4.74%, which works out to an APR of between 6 and 18 percent. Rates are set based on a customer's business history and personal credit score. On that basis, QuickBooks is being fairly liberal, requiring just a 580 FICO score as a minimum qualification. Indeed, by its own estimates, 60 percent of potential customers for the Capital service wouldn't be able to get a loan elsewhere, the company says.
POV: Short-term infusions of cash are critical for small business, whether to bridge expenses during a traditionally slow time of year, or to hire a key new worker or workers. QuickBooks, with its intimate view of an applicant's financial picture—many not only enter debits and credits into the application, but connect their bank and other accounts—can make decisions on a loan much more quickly than a traditional bank, with far less documentation prep required on the part of borrowers.
While a small business could conceivably get better interest rates and loan terms with a bank, QuickBooks' lending parameters are far from usurious. There are also no prepayment penalties or underwriting fees involved. However, borrowers do face a key risk factor: The loans are personally guaranteed, rather secured by collateral. That means entrepreneurs are on the hook if their business operations can't pay back the loans.
It is not clear how much money QuickBooks will lend, but a spokesperson told Bloomberg an initial pilot involving hundreds of businesses went exceedingly well. Overall, the program is a novel way for QuickBooks to generate more revenue from existing customers while taking advantage of the data it already collects.
CVS to offer next-day prescription delivery: Amid its attempt at a mega-merger with health insurer Aetna, CVS Health has announced plans for next-day delivery of pharmacy products, a move that comes as Amazon mulls an entry into prescription drug sales. Here are the key details from CVS's announcement:
CVS Pharmacy will offer free, same-day delivery service within hours from all locations in Manhattan beginning on December 4. Prescriptions and a curated selection of over-the-counter products will be delivered directly from CVS Pharmacy in secure tamper-proof packaging right to customers' doors to assure complete privacy.
Same-day delivery will expand to Miami, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, DC and San Francisco in early 2018. These new delivery options will enhance CVS Pharmacy's national network of solutions designed to give customers flexibility in how they want to shop.
POV: CVS has already partnered with Instacart to deliver front-of-store items, including over-the-counter medications, but it's not clear how successful that effort has been so far. It has about 2,600 retail stores in the U.S., with stiff competition from the likes of Walgreens, Rite Aid and Walmart. In recent years, CVS has torn down or closed many smaller locations and opened larger-footprint stores with expanded grocery and household item sections. CVS says its Instacart deal will be expanded to 50 percent of U.S. households this year.
While adding rapid delivery for prescriptions can be seen as a defensive hedge against Amazon, CVS and its peers have a center of gravity that shouldn't be discounted. Even assuming that Amazon, should it enter the market, can provide lower prices and satisfactory service, many drug consumers have lengthy relationships with their retail pharmacies and pharmacists, ties that won't necessarily be broken quickly. CVS is nonetheless wise to get out in front of the Amazon threat, and you can expect rivals to follow suit quickly.