  A Chatbot is a popular platform to enable users to interact with a software
or website to gather information or execute actions in an automated fashion. In
recent years, chatbots are being used for executing financial transactions,
however, there are a number of security issues, such as secure authentication,
data integrity, system availability and transparency, that must be carefully
handled for their wide-scale adoption. Recently, the blockchain technology,
with a number of security advantages, has emerged as one of the foundational
technologies with the potential to disrupt a number of application domains,
particularly in the financial sector. In this paper, we forward the idea of
integrating a chatbot with blockchain technology in the view to improve the
security issues in financial chatbots. More specifically, we present BONIK, a
blockchain empowered chatbot for financial transactions, and discuss its
architecture and design choices. Furthermore, we explore the developed
Proof-of-Concept (PoC), evaluate its performance, analyse how different
security and privacy issues are mitigated using BONIK.
