HSBC has deployed an internal chatbot powered by Google Cloud’s artificial intelligence (AI) technology to speed bank employees’ handling of questions about the bank’s internal frameworks and policies.  

The Operational Risk and Resilience Application, or ORRA, chatbot was born out of the $2.7 trillion bank’s aim to use AI and machine learning to reduce the time employees spend on manually intensive, internal queries. The bot features an internal document search function that leverages conversational AI, via Google’s Dialogflow natural language processing (NLP) platform, to assist bank employees looking for policy–related guidance.  

“ORRA learns from every conversation and, at the most basic level, the more questions employees have about a specific policy, the more likely that policy may be due for simplification or revision,” said Steve Suarez, HSBC’s global head of innovation, finance and risk, in a release. The chatbot will give users access to immediate, accurate policy information, freeing up employees to focus on the less–routine aspects of their jobs, Suarez added.  

ORRA is available to all HSBC employees on the bank’s intranet, allowing them to obtain direct answers to questions, and uses NLP to examine large documents for “specific answers in milliseconds,.” according to Google. 

While chatbots can vary in sophistication, they are being increasingly used by banks to handle transactional banking requests and customer-facing queries. HSBC’s approach to leveraging these bots to help employees answer policy questions might be the next step toward further integrating AI into the way banks conduct their own business.  

According to a report from research and advisory firm Gartner, banks are deploying automation technologies, such as chatbots, to target operational efficiency and customer experience across business lines. While chatbots can help ease the strain on call centers and employees, the report also notes that, “in banking, typical challenges include long implementation time and the need for large training datasets.” 

HSBC hopes to eventually use its new “FAQ Chatbot” for risk-related guidance, broader polices and procedural data; the bot can also be enhanced to support multiple languages, mobile interactions, speech, and search numeric and text-based data stores, according to Google. 

“This opens up more possibilities in this space as more information is hosted on the cloud,” said Gareth Butler, HSBC’s head of risk transformation and innovation lead for Asia Pacific.  

Bank Automation Ignite, on April 13-14, is the event for inspiring automation initiatives and investment in financial services. At the virtual event, financial services professionals can discover new use cases and technologies that are accelerating automation in banking. Learn more and register at www.BankAutomationIgnite.com.