Coinbase buys Agara to build out customer support in India
The US-based digital asset trading company keeps on making the headlines, week after week, in a clear sign that the firm is well funded, organized and building out infrastructure to support its growing business.
Coinbase has agreed to acquire Agara in a move to step up its customer support capabilities and reconfirm the exchange’s strategy to continue to build out its tech hub in India.
Agara is an AI-powered support platform with operations in India and the United States, bringing expertise in machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) to Coinbase’s engineering team.
Agara’s Deep Learning and Conversational AI technology will be used to automate and enhance the customer experience (CX) tools at Coinbase.
The cryptocurrency exchange has increased five times its support staff headcount and will deliver 24/7 phone support and live messaging by end of the year, according to the firm.
Acquiring Agara helps to fulfill the plan to provide customers with new personalized, intelligent, and real-time support options and accomplish 24/7 support by end of 2021.
Coinbase has made its tech hub in India a relevant piece of its cryptocurrency trading project. The firm is already established there, which makes it easier to welcome the Agara team.
The US-based digital asset trading company keeps on making the headlines, week after week, in a clear sign that the firm is well funded, organized and building out infrastructure to support its growing business.
Coinbase has selected IHS Markit for its tax reporting tools as the IRS becomes more vigilant of the digital asset space and crypto exchanges are more pressured to provide client information to the government.
While the company improved anti-money laundering (AML) and know-your customer (KYC) procedures as well as overall security throughout the years, it wasn’t enough to prevent a hacking incident from occuring.
In early October, Coinbase announced 6,000 customers accounts had been hacked between March and May of this year.
It resulted due to an error in the SMS notification sent out for a wallet restore function where the SMS did not reach the intended recipient but was instead rerouted to the hackers’ numbers.
This helped them to gain access to the user accounts and transfer their funds to those of the wallets owned by the hackers.
The company said that it had since quickly fixed the bug, informed the users about the issue, restored the account access to the users, and also refunded the losses back to the clients.
Such incidents are always a blow for trading companies in this emerging asset class, but the firm seems to remain one of the most trusted cryptocurrency exchanges in the world.
Proof of that is that Facebook chose Coinbase as its custody partner for the launch of a pilot of the wallet Novi, which is a digital wallet that people can use to send and receive cryptos and funds safely and securely at a low cost.
