- BNP Paribas and Alior Bank joined forces with Booksy to enable mobile booking visits at their branches.
- For Booksy, these partnerships prove that they can be much more than a booking platform for beauty appointments.
Imagine the app, where you can book literally any appointment at any place starting with beauty salons, through banks, and ending with City Halls. Would you give it a try? We definitely would!
Famous as a beauty marketplace for scheduling appointments, Booksy has just signed a contract with BNP Paribas Bank Polska. From now on, the bank’s clients can book their appointments online through Booksy.
Przemek Gdanski, CEO at BNP Paribas Bank Polska emphasized that they have joined their forces with Booksy to make visits to the retail branches much safer and more comfortable. ‘Now making appointments with our experts is as easy as it gets. It will help to maintain social distance and avoid lines in front of our branches.’
Reportedly, more banks and institutions are looking to implement the same solution with Booksy. BNP Paribas was fast and made the first move.
The clients of the bank are able to make appointments at one hundred selected BNP Paribas branches in Poland.
You can select a branch, a time slot, and finally a topic of the appointment – mortgage, investments, savings, or accounts. The whole process can take less than a minute. After arranging the meeting you will receive a confirmation by email, and a reminder just before the visit.
If customer feedback is positive, the bank will move on with the cooperation. The plans include covering other branches and adding the option of arranging meetings with consultants of other specializations.
During the first two days, over 150 appointments were scheduled through Booksy, Maciej Chlebowski, Director of the Branch Network Development and Transformation Department at BNP Paribas Bank Polska, told ITKeyMedia.
Now Alior Bank appears on the Booksy platform
Booksy has just announced another cooperation with Alior Bank, a large universal bank in Poland. From now on, Alior Bank customers can book a visit to the branch via the Booksy system. The service is available not only for individual customers but also for micro-entrepreneurs who need to go to the outlet personally.
The cooperation between Booksy and Alior Bank is a result of the RBL_START # COVID-19 challenge announced by Alior Bank and PZU in April 2020.
‘RBL_START #COVID-19 aimed to find, in cooperation with startups, solutions to the effects of the ongoing pandemic like avoiding large queues of people,’ said Alior Bank Vice President Marcin Jaszczuk.
For starters, Alior’s clients will be able to use Booksy to schedule appointments in Warsaw, Krakow or Wroclaw. Depending on the customer feedback, the list of branches and cities will be expanded, the service may also appear in the future in the Alior Mobile smartphone application. That would be an interesting case of dual-platform integration.
The beginning of a new era for Booksy
Adam Gorniak, COO at Booksy, said that it can be the beginning of a new era for Booksy, moving from “health & beauty appointments” to “appointments”! ‘We have just made the first step by starting a collaboration with BNP Paribas. In our case, COVID-19 looks to be a bump on the road as its challenges stimulated us to think outside the box and gave rise to new opportunities, even bigger than before. Our motto #ShootForTheMoon is displayed at its best!’
The COVID-19 pandemic almost completely stopped the movement in the Booksy application when governments have temporarily banned hairdressing and cosmetics in all international markets. As a result, users were disappearing or suspending their subscriptions. Booksy decided to dismiss half of the crew – a total of about 150 people from different countries. Today the company rebuilds its position and opens up for new opportunities.
Stefan Batory, CEO at Booksy
According to Stefan Batory, Booksy CEO, the cooperation between Booksy and Alior Bank confirms that almost any business can use the app effectively as a response to the new needs of customers. ‘The bank takes full advantage of the platform’s capabilities by offering booking through social media channels and directly on Google.’
Following in the steps of Amazon
As Stefan Batory has explained, the company’s strategy has always been to create a universal platform for arranging any appointments. Just like Amazon, which started with selling books and later became a marketplace where you can buy almost everything. The crisis made the company start implementing the strategy faster.
Partnering with the bank is a good step, but the Polish startup Booksy is still looking for new ways to grow revenue. ‘Handling visits to BNP Paribas branches will not significantly change the structure of our revenue. We are currently looking for new ways to prove that the application will also work in sectors other than beauty,’ said Stefan Batory in the conversation with Puls Biznesu.
If you have an idea of how to implement Booksy’s platform into a new niche, feel free to reach out to us at [email protected].
