“The $2.2 trillion bank is now deploying Erica as a digital assistant to support live chat agents in call centers as well as employees in commercial banking and wealth investment.
‘Organizations are realizing that they can do things like automate 20% of their search service desk requests from employees and allow people to do something different than automating a few 100 password reset requests in a week,’
Chatbot vendor Finn AI saw increased chatbot adoption from COVID as smaller banks began implementing the technology, Jake Tyler, Finn AI chief executive officer told BAN. Among Finn AI’s clients are $521.9 billion Truist Bank, $55.8 billion ATB Financial, $3.2 billion United Federal Credit Union and Canadian challenger bank KOHO, which has raised $113.4 million over seven rounds. Finn AI has raised $14 million to date, according to Crunchbase.
‘COVID has been five years of adoption happening in a year,’ Tyler said. ‘We’re still responding to that. I think what we’ll see over the next few years is just mass adoption of conversational AI.’
The Dover Federal Credit Union (DFCU), with more than 43,000 members, was among the financial institutions that adopted an intelligent ‘virtual assistant’ this year. The Delaware-based $465.8 million credit union chose Interface.ai for its call center after the pandemic led to call volumes doubling, said Tyler Kuhn, vice president of marketing & digital experience at DFCU.
DFCU plans to add Interface.ai to its website and online/mobile banking services, Kuhn added. Interface.ai markets its ‘out-of-the-box’ solution exclusively to banks and credit unions, counting $4.7 billion Gesa Credit Union, with 250,000 members, among its customers.
AI-powered digital assistant provider Kasisto is also seeing more adoption by smaller financial institutions. Kasisto’s partnership with digital banking technology provider NCR has helped, said Stephen Epstein, Kasisto’s chief marketing officer. Among Kasisto’s clients are the $499.3 billion Singaporean multinational banking and financial services firm DBS Bank, Mastercard, $1.9 trillion Wells Fargo and $1.3 trillion TD Bank.
Finn AI also changed its pricing to appeal to smaller banks and credit unions, adding three levels of AI-based conversational chatbots in June. The first level is a ‘quick start’ chatbot for small- and mid-sized financial institutions that runs visitors through a public dotcom site for live support to common questions; it’s designed to launch within a month. Level two is for mobile and online banking sites and offers a more concierge approach to help customers. Level three can run across any channel the bank designates for API integration to digital banking platforms that help customers via chat.
‘For sure, it’s what I think most people will have — not a chatbot, but a virtual assistant, in the future and that’s what the virtual assistant will look like. It’s certainly where our product is going,’ he added.”
