Banks embrace the brave new world of AI

Posted: 9th March 2022

While physical branches may be dwindling in number, and digital transactions comprise the bulk of bank-customer interactions, the need for consistent and quick customer service has not changed.

What has changed is how technology is vastly accelerating the delivery of customer service.

Of the many customer service transformations witnessed over the past decade, the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), and the many use cases it is now exploring, is perhaps the most enthralling of all.

We’re not quite at the point of having a financial services form of Skynet ruling the banking world just yet, but we are witnessing banks, which took the first tentative steps in testing AI, now deploying it in a growing number of front-end and back-end processes.

Lower costs per transaction and interaction, effective redeploying of in-house bank staff to more profitable sales operations, and much speedier customer issue resolution are just some of the positives banks are discovering by embracing AI.

Turkey:

One of the most dynamic and forward-thinking markets in Europe, is a fine example. Garanti BBVA’s use of AI is achieving huge process efficiencies, including the speed and quality of customer service.

UGI, Turkey’s first voice process assistant launched in 2016, has undergone a major upgrade and now enables customers to exchange messages with UGI 2.0 and receive support for their banking transactions.

Since 2016, UGI has been used more than 53 million times by 4.6 million customers. The WhatsApp chatbot of Garanti BBVA was also reinforced with the same infrastructure and a joint intelligent assistant was created at all touchpoints with customers.

RPA (Robotic Process Automation) initiatives launched across Garanti led to nearly 200 possible use cases being identified to date, 44 of which were automated in 2020, bringing the number of processes running on RPA to 51 in total.

In this context, 291 new machine and deep learning models were integrated into Garanti BBVA systems in 2020. AI capability was utilised in processing customer suggestions and demands using text mining, lessening call duration by 7% on average.

Also in Turkey, Yapi Kredi built on the capabilities of its AI‑based chatbot in 2020, with the chatbot responding to over 3 million messages on three different media.

Maxi, İşbank’s assistant application developed using AI and natural language processing technologies, carried out nearly 60 million dialogues with more than 7.2 million customers as at year-end 2020.

In 2020, İşbank took one more step and signed its name under the establishment of Turkey’s largest artificial intelligence centre.

Spain:

In 2020, CaixaBank announced that it would be investing €931 million in technology and development, including increased implementation of robotics and AI.

As of 2020, 476 bank applications were managed in the cloud, and 144 robotics use cases had been deployed, including cognitive assistants for administrative processes and virtual assistants for customers.

Russia:

The year 2020 saw Sberbank rebranding as Sber, to represent its evolution into a digital banking and payment ecosystem hub.

Sber developed more services for its technology platform in 2020, including its suite of Salut voice assistants. Sber’s chatbot makes it possible to automatically address customer queries in 65% of cases, and uses AI to recognise the topic of a client question to run the suitable service scenario.

AI is nothing new of course, but what is surprising is how quickly many big banks, known to drag their heels when it comes to trying new things, have become early adopters of AI. Having witnessed how it can revolutionise operations across their entire enterprises, banks are rapidly becoming its biggest cheerleaders.

To reflect this new reality, the Digital & Card Payment Yearbooks have been redesigned to encompass the widening payment and FinTech ecosystems. Covering 43 countries across Europe and Eurasia, the 2022 editions include even more valuable data and insights (including growth forecasts) generated from the impact of Covid-19 on all payment metrics.

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Categories: Ai Banking