Standard Bank has today unwrapped its new – and a first for Southern Africa – Instant Messaging service with private banker assist add real-time SMS chat, letting you speak chat directly to an agent for your everyday banking, trading or even more complex transaction queries. The service is powered by Standard Bank in conjunction with WeChat.

According to Sibongiseni Ngundze, Head of Retail Banking at Standard Bank, the hassle of having only limited contact with your bank, through physically going into branch and standing in queues, or calling call centres and sending emails is now truly in the past.

Given that you’re either a Prestige and/or Private customer, you’ll simply need to phone or email your bankers, or speak to your banker in-branch and provide them with your WeChat ID before being taken through a verification process, after which you’ll be registered on the network and then simply need to log in to WeChat and search ‘Standard Bank’ under ‘Official Accounts’ to have access to chat to the team of virtual bankers anytime, anywhere. To sweeten the deal, Standard Bank will throw in the benefit of 3GB of free WiFi, valid for three months, through AlwaysOn in AlwaysOn zones.

‘But why WeChat?’ you may ask. With research showing there are over one hundred million people sending instant messages worldwide, while there are 5 million WeChat users in South Africa – it is the most accessible platform for SB users.

“These days most relationships are conducted via instant messaging, so why not your banking relationships?” asked Standard Bank’s Ngundze.

The Relationship Banking Instant Messaging service will run uninterruptedly (given, you know, there are no glitches in the system) 24/7/365. Not convinced? See the video after the jump while you decide. 

[youtube link=” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiFnvcUqlOs” width=”590″ height=”315″]

Aside from providing access to the VoIP calling services it has become known for, Viber’s also bringing a few features tailored specifically for Microsoft’s operating system. Namely, we’re talking things like pinning conversations to the Start screen as well as the ability to be used in Snap View mode. Additionally, Viber for Windows 8 offers full Live Tile support, allowing you to easily spot notifications and have quick access to the app. CEO Talmon Marco says coming to Windows 8 was “the natural next step” for his company, adding that this is part of Viber’s big picture strategy and “commitment to wide, cross platform availability.”

Know what they do, who do they talk to!
For parents, it is extremely important to know what friends do their kids make, where they go out for hangouts with them and what do they talk about. But for that, you either have to get an invisibility cloak that you could put on and be with all at all times or fond about a practical alternative. Luckily there is an alternative!

Going stealth without an invisibility cloak!
The better way of tracking your kids and knowing all about their conversations, you can use some reliable spying application. Since almost all teens have a smartphone nowadays and some of them even have tablets, too; you can easily take advantage and install such spying app on their device.

But if you are interested in leaving out nothing, better go for StealthGenie. This is the only app in the market that will let you track Viber conversations so you could conveniently spy on all the Viber text messages, contacts, pictures, videos, audio files and time and date stamps for each kid. This way you get to monitor Viber app inside out!

If your kids are doing silly things like sending inappropriate pictures to their friends or including in sexting, you can know it in time to stop it from getting worse! Since Viber app is free and uses internet connectivity to send and receive the messages, you need to be ultra-sure that your kids are not using it for any indecent or dangerous purposes. Who knows they could be contacting some drug dealer through Viber?

Monitor with sophistication:
A sophisticate way to monitor all the activities of your kids is to keep an eye on their cell phone activities using the help of StealthGenie. Monitor Viber calls and Viber messages of your kids using this amazing app and find out what they are up to at all times.

*Stealth Genie