Conversational AI can assist banks with customer needs while providing savings for the banks that use the technology. 

It allows financial institutions to better know and service customers via existing data, Erin Wynn, director of product management at technology company NCR Corp., told Bank Automation News. 

“There are the things that [banks] could learn or that AI could do to start tracking or trending, by saying something’s different about [a customer] … based on their behavior,” Wynn said. “Maybe they are more likely to leave that bank and how can we proactively stop that.”

One provider, Galileo Financial Technologies, has unveiled its conversational AI engine and, unlike ChatGPT, it can be deployed in banks’ systems to help assist customers with banking needs and predict future requests. 

Its solution, Cyberbank Konecta, is a cloud-based intelligent digital assistant that uses natural language processing to understand and generate answers for customers using machine learning with multi-language support to assist with customer needs or questions, Michael Haney, head of digital core at Galileo’s sister company Technisys, told Bank Automation News. 

“Machine learning brings us adaptability so that the model can change over time,” Haney said. “We can take things like human speech or the written word or images, and now we can start to talk about processing these incredibly complex unstructured data sets.” 

The platform connects with financial institutions via Galileo’s APIs, with a six- to nine-month integration process depending on the bank’s core systems, as Konecta helps “fill in [data] gaps that the bank might have,” based on the bank’s needs, he said. 

The platform also can reduce costs for banks by allocating customer service resources, minimizing call volumes and reducing hardware and software costs by utilizing the cloud, according to a company release. 

Not just transactional

Conversational AI providers — including Boost.AI, LivePerson and Kore.AI — offer tools to write in pre-programmed answers to customer questions. Konecta, to differentiate, can adapt to human behaviors and requests to anticipate a customer’s needs, Haney said. 

Another AI-powered platform that recently came to market is tech giant Google’s Bard, which was introduced last month but is in the early stages of viability for consumer use, according to Google. 

The use of technology such as conversational AI can give users the feel of a one-on-one conversation with a professional while mitigating the amount of manual work customers must do to get a response to a banking question, Haney said. 

“The future is how everybody interacts with a personal banker in a conversational way as opposed to filling out forms and pushing buttons,” he said. “We wanted to actually provide education, advice and guidance, and not just be transaction oriented. … This is why you don’t see ChatGPT rolling out to customer-facing [platforms] yet.”