Inter teams up with Twilio to offer its account holders an excellent digital experience
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Challenge
Provide low-latency, glitch-free digital communication, improving customer relationships
Solution
Inter implemented Twilio, ensuring network security and end-to-end service quality for its communications, with a robust, secure, and scalable communications infrastructure that offers rapid rollout and enterprise-grade quality.
Inter is one of the most innovative companies in the Brazilian financial market, with over 30 years experience.
Originally known as Banco Intermedium, its focus was on real estate loans, later becoming an investment bank. Even with its decades-long history, Inter has become best known to the general public for its pioneering spirit and innovation in the online world, as it was the first bank to offer digital accounts to its account holders in Brazil in 2015. Since then, the company has become a pioneer of innovation and modernization in the banking market, experiencing exponential growth throughout its journey.
Currently, Inter has over 37 million open customer accounts, with 30,000 new accounts being created every day. In addition, the company is seeking international expansion, with 2 million accounts already opened in the United States and plans to go further.
As a company that has experienced exponential organic growth and which has always been committed to innovation, one of its most important traits is its pursuit of technological innovation, process automation and digitization, always striving to deliver better relationships with its customers, convenience for its employees, and innovation throughout the entire banking process.
Pioneering financial digital transformation and the Super App
Before partnering with Twilio, Inter was dealing with one issue: the need to make the entire account opening process more digital. Even though their accounts were digital, much of the customer relationship process was not particularly digital, being somewhat more analog or “manual.” There were still many written forms that needed to be filled out.
This lasted until mid-2019, when the bank launched its Super App, bringing all banking processes together in one place in order to make access to banking more accessible to all types of people. With Inter’s Super App, the company offers integrated and secure solutions designed to unlock possibilities, allowing for a smarter relationship with money.
"Our aim has always been to revolutionize banking, making life easier for our customers, but for this to work seamlessly, we needed to find partners who could offer us service stability, scalability for our growth, and enable us to build excellent customer relationships. That’s when Twilio came into the picture."
During the pandemic, the entire banking market underwent major changes, one of which was the rapid adoption of digital accounts. However, many banks were not prepared for this and had to make significant changes to serve their account holders in a short period of time. “For us, this process was simpler, as we had already started working with digital accounts many years ago. We already had a business model in place and we already had the right partners,” says Daniela.
Search for OTP solution to bring quality and stability
The partnership with Twilio began in 2020, aimed at improving the internal messaging process, since at that time the solution that was being used was unstable, prone to glitches, and had other difficulties.
As a digital agency with no physical branches, all accounts were opened using security tokens, both for opening new accounts and for password recovery, for example. As such, messaging has always been crucial to its operation. The old system, with its instabilities, caused major issues and inconveniences in customer service, such as tokens often not being delivered to customers to complete verification.
"Good customer service is essential, especially when it comes to banking services, given that people are sensitive, and rightly so, to matters involving their personal finances. With this in mind, we are dedicated to improving our services by partnering with Twilio."
Thanks to Twilio’s messaging services, Inter can improve its SMS delivery service, reducing the cost of sending messages, ensuring the delivery of OTP messages, and increasing customer loyalty.
Initially, the Twilio platform started out as a backup option to bridge the gaps in the previous system, but it soon became the primary and only messaging system within the company due to its high delivery quality.
"Twilio’s service is better priced, better quality, has low latency, and delivery is much better, resulting in greater customer satisfaction."
Multi-channels to serve diverse audiences
Eventually, the SMS service was joined by WhatsApp, which is used for certain use cases and specific audiences. META’s digital channel delivered high quality and a higher ROI for some types of delivery.
Inter is home to a number of different types of account holders, and currently, Prime and Win portfolio customers are the ones who use the WhatsApp messaging service, in addition to human customer service available via WhatsApp. Everything is being done within Inter’s Super App.
The entire WhatsApp platform was implemented using Twilio’s API solution, and today it is also used for other areas of business, such as relationships with corporate account holders.
Another result that WhatsApp brought was a 4.4% increase in account openings, which shows that this channel has been a customer favorite. For Prime and Win account holders, the Super App also offers contact with the manager on the app screen itself, which occurs via WhatsApp or videoconference.
Despite this, SMS remains essential to Inter’s operations, still accounting for 90% of OTP messages for all transactions.
“We prefer to maintain more messaging channel options at this time, keeping SMS purely for transactional purposes and WhatsApp for customer relationship and transactional messaging, even offering investment advice, always providing a human touch. We understand that our account holders, and perhaps even Brazilians in general, prefer to use WhatsApp for longer conversations, just as SMS is still considered the “official” channel when it comes to alerts and notifications for banking transactions. Each channel serves a communication strategy, and together they are vital to improving the quality of our customer relationships and service,” adds Daniela.
WhatsApp in the fight against fraud
Another feature of WhatsApp as a customer relationship tool at Inter is its anti-fraud processes. Thus, whenever a purchase outside the account holder's consumption pattern is detected, they receive a message via WhatsApp to confirm who is making the purchase. In this case, the customer response rate is high, around 70%, which shows that verified profiles within WhatsApp provide the trust that customers want, and they take the appropriate action, which is to engage with the message and make the required confirmations to verify whether a purchase is legitimate or not.
Is AI the future?
As an innovative company always ahead of the curve, Inter is also considering investments in generative AI and is already conducting some testing. The company already uses other AI tools, such as its virtual assistant, Babi. Innovations in AI are something that will potentially be integrated into tools such as WhatsApp to further improve customer service.
Another important point for Inter in the future is expansion outside Brazil. Inter acquired USEND, a North American shipping company that already uses Twilio’s platform for SMS and telephony.
"We really like Twilio’s business model. It allows for flexibility, integration with any legacy technology, and is still a platform that our developers can build and create upon. This is ideal for our domestic and international growth."
