MonPay Case Study
MonPay provides a social payment experience through Sendbird
MonPay
MonPay is the financial services subsidiary of MobiCom Corporation, the largest mobile phone operator in Mongolia. MonPay’s mission is to provide financial services via the safest, simplest, and fastest solutions. Through its advanced and expanding digital ecosystem, users have access to features such as secure money transfers, payments, settlements, and loans.
"Building messaging features is almost as difficult as building a new application itself. Our resources are tight, and with the ever-growing roadmap of new important features to build and promotions to launch, there was just too much to do. Our collaboration with Sendbird saved a tremendous amount of time."
Luvsantseren Baranzad, Software Product Specialist at MonPay
Business Challenge
While MonPay had a robust user infrastructure for their finance service, as the company’s user base exponentially grew, MonPay found themselves missing a core component that they believed would significantly elevate their user experience; messaging and chat capabilities.
For MonPay, building a community across its users was very enticing and advantageous, particularly with the number of users having some form of relationship in the real world. This would allow for even higher rates of engagement and stickiness for the payments application. Luvsantseren Baranzad, Software Product Specialist at MonPay, states that “If users had the capabilities to communicate with one another over what they’re paying for, whether that’s dinner, traveling or a night out, this makes payments much more fun, and chat helps it become more of a bonding experience than just splitting a bill.”
Why MonPay Chose Sendbird
While MonPay did consider to build chat in-house, such an undertaking would have been immensely complex for the team. With short timelines and limited resources, Baranzad explained, “Building messaging features is almost as difficult as building a new application itself. Our resources are tight, and with the ever-growing roadmap of new important features to build and promotions to launch, there was just too much to do. Our collaboration with Sendbird saved a tremendous amount of time.”
Furthermore, MonPay drew much of its confidence from Sendbird’s notable customer base. With large APAC brands and similar use cases such as Paytm, PayPay, and KB Bank, MonPay was assured that Sendbird could match the scale and performance they were anticipating.
As a company based in Asia, real-time chat capabilities necessitated real-time technical support, which was hugely important for MonPay. With Sendbird’s prevalent APAC presence, MonPay knew they would have a dedicated team working with them and could answer questions and issues live as they came versus having a day or multi-day buffer when speed is often of the essence. According to Baranzad, he was “Very surprised by how smooth and fast Sendbird would respond whenever there was a question or issue. The quality feedback and solutions we received, I was shocked at how smooth that process was.”
Finally, MonPay’s heavy focus on building community among its users is tied directly with Sendbird’s mission to build connections in a digital world. The MonPay app is meant to bridge friends, consumers, and businesses as it seamlessly facilitates the transfer of money. Baranzad explains, “sending and receiving messages, creating group chats; these features were all essential for us. It’s not just sending bills but connecting over collective experiences. This is what we wanted chat to be about, and this is why we chose Sendbird.”
Results
With over 550k app downloads and up to 200k monthly active users, the immediate benefit the MonPay team realized partnering with Sendbird was the incredible time savings on their product roadmap. Building effective chat to this scale is extremely complex, and Luvsantseren was clear that projects took very long to complete because the company does almost everything themselves. “Collaborating with Sendbird, we had to have saved at least a year and a half to two years of work.”
Adding a social, in-app chat experience has helped increase MonPay’s retention rate above 35% (compared to an average of 16% for other apps) as well as an increase in average transaction value since integrating Sendbird Chat.
While there has been an increase in Millennial users with MonPay’s social payments use case, “increasing retention rates from current users and having them adopt the new messaging features was one of our top priorities, and what we saw immediately after launching with Sendbird,” states Luvsantseren.
Prior to Sendbird, many users would communicate and form group chats on third-party messenger platforms such as WhatsApp and iMessage. This would take users outside the MonPay experience and create a disparity between what was paid for and why, affecting overall retention rates. Since implementing Sendbird Chat, there has been a proven increase in retention as MonPay users engage more within the app because of its community culture and unified payment experience. Users can now socialize and form group chats with up to 20 others and have made mundane tasks such as splitting bills much more fun and enjoyable.
Furthermore, MonPay has expanded into other industries as well, such as gaming. With the popularity of multiplayer online games such as Krafton’s PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PubG), MonPay now allows PubG gamers to make in-app purchases using their platform, creating an even more seamless user experience.
Luvsantseren notes, “Our current app is similar to other super applications in Asia. We add many different services in one application for better user flexibility and functionality. You can buy movie tickets, research online games, and send and lend money, so having a social component such as chat linking all these capabilities should prove very advantageous for us.”
On its roadmap, MonPay is poised to expand the parameters of its in-app conversational use cases. A focus for the company will be to tap into the digital banking industry, thus making online banking more accessible for its ever-growing user base. Luvsantseren adds, “We’re trying to reach those financial markets with our new products and services, such as virtual banking cards. Breaking into the digital banking industry is a very attractive goal to us, and we know Sendbird will be a great partner along this journey.”
Since day one, Sendbird has partnered with AWS to establish itself as a leading conversations platform that enables a secure, global, and scalable in-app conversation experience. Sendbird is an AWS advanced tier technology partner operating 45+ AWS native services in 9 regions. Thanks to Amazon’s AWS Auto Scaling and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud services, Sendbird manages massive digital traffic sending billions of messages monthly. Using Elastic Load Balancing and Amazon Route53 geolocation functions, Sendbird ensures reliable global traffic distribution. Sendbird also leverages AWS CloudFormation to automate its servers’ management in each region efficiently. Lastly, AWS Elasticache and Amazon Aurora allow Sendbird to achieve millisecond latency and data storage for over 300 million monthly active users. Sendbird’s world-class conversation platform architecture and technical foundations are certified by AWS.