TD Ameritrade launched a Facebook Messenger chatbot this week that received lots of press, including a mention on CNBC. The chatbot joins TD Ameritrade’s Amazon Alexa skill to provide its customers with conversational options for accessing their accounts.

Any user of Facebook Messenger can interact with the bot by messaging TD Ameritrade. The bot offers a number of functions for those who don’t have a TD Ameritrade account. For example, there’s no need to login to get a market snapshot or stock quote, or to see the latest PR Newswire headlines related to finance or view educational videos.

The real trick is in offering secure access to a customer’s TD Ameritrade account directly from the Facebook Messenger chat interface. Penny Crosman published an article in American Banker that investigates the company’s approach to secure login. Crosman interviewed both Sunayna Tuteja, director of emerging technologies and innovation at TD Ameritrade, as well as our own Dan Miller, lead analyst & founder, Opus Research.

According to Crosman’s article, TD Ameritrade uses a technology known as three-legged OAUTH to securely authenticate the account holder. Three-legged OAUTH enables a user to provide his or her account credentials to a trusted server without the intermediary application — in this case, Facebook Messenger — seeing that information. The best explanation I could find of the technology was this video by Michael Bissell.

As Dan points out in the Crosman article, user expectations are changing and putting more pressure on brands to offer an omnichannel experience. No matter where or how they interact with with a brand, users want access to the same information in the easiest way possible.

Companies like TD Ameritrade seem to have adopted the strategy that it’s critical to keep pace with customer expectations. With the launch of their Facebook Messenger chatbot, the brokerage firm has taken another step in building out a truly omnichannel offering.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Intelligent Authentication, Articles, Mobile + Location