Paytm acquires personal assistant app Shifu, to offer more customized experience

Paytm acquires personal assistant app Shifu, to offer more customized experience

Mobile commerce platform Paytm has acquired Shifu, a context-aware personal assistant application. With this acquisition, Paytm looks to more personalized experience by predicted user behavior based on past usage, location and other data points.

Shifu, created by The Signals, analyzes smartphone behavior patterns of users and provide them personalized and relevant recommendations. Key features of the application includes call forecast based on location, smart battery alerts, app try suggestion and automated cloud sync. According to the official announcement, the app will continue to be available in its original form after the acquisition, while the 20-member team behind Shifu has joined various verticals at Paytm.

As said before, Paytm is looking to bring more personalized experience in its application. “Shifu has been quite popular as an intelligent task-managing application. By integrating their technology & behavioural modelling with Paytm app, we will be able to offer a highly intuitive and personalized experience to our users,” comments Kiran Vasireddy, Senior Vice President, Paytm.

Even as competition in the mobile-commerce segment grows, apps such as Flipkart,Snapdeal and Paytm are improving and expanding their services with adding more features and categories. However, personalization is believed to be one of key elements that will drive the segment. Personalization is helps improve click through rates as well as increases conversion rates. Already, Flipkart and Snapdeal do a fair bit of customization for more relevant recommendations.

The acquisition of Shifu comes weeks after Paytm acquired Near.in to strengthen its O2O (online-to-offline) segment. The company had then said the O2O is among one of the key focus areas and aims to further tap the local commerce.