Wyre Bot For WeChat & Facebook

Utilizing WeChat & Facebook Messenger for business invoicing

By Michael Dunworth.

China and the US are absolute behemoths when it comes to global trade, with over 1,000,000,000 (that’s 1 billion) invoices issued between the two countries over the past 12 months. Our team at Wyre has built the fastest business payment service between the two countries, and has been experimenting with ways to continue to innovate and improve how we serve our thousands of customers.

One experiment we were excited about was providing a very lightweight tool for simple invoicing direct from our customers’ favorite platforms in China to foreign partners based in the US or Hong Kong. It felt like a great way to test how digitally enabled companies could begin to streamline commercial relationships on platforms they were already using regularly. We’re proud to share that we’ve built Wyre Bot — the first blockchain payments tool on WeChat and Facebook.

After searching out through a lot of the new bot platforms and startups, we saw that the leading one for cross-platform deployment was Recime. As WeChat is critical to our customers, and other bot services don’t have it or prioritize it.

Features

Access and Use the ubiquitous bot across WeChat & Facebook

Generate Payment Invoice

Raise Customer Support Tickets via Chat

Authenticate and Store Invoices On Blockchain For Fraud Protection

Generate Payment Invoice

Many businesses are overwhelmingly using WeChat as a means of communication. However, the business systems they rely on for order management and invoicing are not on this platform; which forces users to switch between multiple systems for even the most simple transaction. Below is an example of using the Wyre WeChat bot to execute an invoice.

What’s happening in the above demonstration

The supplier provides the transaction details to the Wyre Bot

The Wyre Bot generates an invoice in .pdf format and sends an email

Both the supplier requesting the invoice and person paying the invoice are cc’d on the email from Wyre

Invoice will be hashed and stored on the blockchain (see why this is important below)

Raise Customer Support Tickets

While users are right there in the messenger platform, we thought the Wyre Bot would be even more useful if it allowed users to resolve customer support issues with us at the same time. With the Wyre Bot, you can message support and we mark it as a prioritized ticket to our customer support team, which is great for you! You just enter your email address and voila — our team will respond.

Example customer support ticket via Wyre Bot on WeChat

Authenticate and Store Invoices Securely on the Blockchain

As a very simple addition for our customers, we stamp the hash of the invoice the recipients get, onto the blockchain. We do this periodically throughout the day on the hour.

The simplicity of spoofing emails, and making a look-a-like invoices seemed like it could be prone to scams and mis-representation of the service to customers.

Here’s an example of the ASCII input data on the transaction

Invoices generated by the bot have their hash stored on the blockchain. This avoids the need for you to worry about whether or not we sent you the invoice. If it’s on the blockchain, then it’s from us.

In the example above, we’ve got 5 different invoices that we’ve taken the hash of, and put into the blockchain as seen here in the HEX input of this transaction. We are also eagerly awaiting for new technical features such as RSK being deployed on blockchain protocols, and will use these new technologies to build useful new features for our customers.

This feels a little understated on it’s importance, but in this day and age, it’s so simple to forge an invoice and impersonate. This is our way of combating that. This could’ve saved Google and Facebook over $100M.

Future Applications

While this is very much experimental for us, and our customer base, the future is bright. Based on demand, we see a lot more applications that this bot will be able to do for our customers. Such as:

Execute payment directly through the bot

Multi-invoicing in one request

Usage across other platforms (WhatsApp, Slack, Line, Viber)

More currency pairs (Euro, British pound, Mexican peso, Japanese yen)

Conclusion

Wyre is built on-top of public blockchain technology and currently provides cross-border payment solutions for large scale enterprises and payment companies through a robust API, and client dashboard. If there’s ways that we can simplify cross-border commerce then we see that as a huge value add for everyone involved.

There is no easier way to receive payments from foreign clients, and it’s only going to be getting better.

Feel free to let us know

What you think of this experiment

What features you want to see

What platforms you want it on next

Get started on Facebook or WeChat now.

Scan to start chatting. Messenger Bot (Left) & WeChat Bot (Right)

Thanks guys!

Kind regards,

Michael.