Fancy chatting with your bank?

The future of banking is very likely to be voice-led. This was a major conclusion at a roundtable about cloud, artificial intelligence (AI) and fintech. 

Walton sharing cloud-based trends for AI and ML.

Nick Walton, MD, ASEAN, AWS, said AWS customers like Active.Ai, which specialises in conversational AI, are fundamentally changing the way customers interact with organisations. he noted that customer expectations have changed with the explosion in the use of messaging apps, smartphones and voice-activated solutions. 

“We're very excited by voice as a platform,” he said. “We see that with the advances in technology underpinned by AI and machine learning (ML) that voice will be increasingly important and a useful interface.”

Ravishankar, Co-founder and CEO, Active.Ai, observed that chat apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are a part of life for consumers in Singapore. “The rules of engagement are shifting,” he said. “The rules of engagement are unstructured. You write... as you speak, as you think. Customers are getting very used to that.”

Active.Ai works with financial institutions to provide domain expertise and brand personas for AI chatbots. The software-as-a-service makes conversational, AI-backed banking easily available to financial institutions so they can be more relevant to their audiences, he said. “You start doing and thinking things in a more natural way,” he said.

Ravishankar says the Millennial customer is a focus for
the finance industry.

Ravishankar added that Active.Ai customers are focused on growing their customer base with Millennials, who have embraced new interaction methods.

“This generation lives on Snapchat, lives on Instagram. They want their bank, their purchasing experience to be very similar,” he said. “Just imagine, you are putting your bank into your WhatsApp. You have to grab the new customers. You can't add 500 more branches.”

Ravishankar added that a scalable, AI-ready infrastructure that is performance-optimised - such as the AWS platform - is invaluable for financial institutions as they can test out what they really want to do. “They (can work) like startups - build very fast, test very fast and then come back and deploy very fast,” he said. “If you want to transform fast, this is the way to go.”

While the question of cloud security comes up often, especially with financial records, Walton shared that customers have done an about-face in recent years. “(Customers) have changed to say 'the cloud is more secure than I can possibly be in my own data centre', that they can't invest in security at the scale that we can,” he said.

Sharma says AI can protect brand reputations and ensure
good customer service.

Mridul Sharma, EVP & Head Technology for IndusInd Bank, an Active.Ai customer, agreed. “I cannot today invest in security the way a provider can,” he said.

Sharma shared that his bank is in the 10^th year of a transformative journey. He noted that customer-facing staff were finding it increasingly difficult to service customers as the number of banking regulations increase, while banks face challenges in ensuring a consistent client experience across a large workforce and many branches in a wide geographical area. 

“The experience that you give customers is very fragmented,” he explained. “Can (each staff) answer a question equally well and take it to the action and get it done there and then?”

Sharma shared that Active.Ai's chatbots are currently being tested internally and will give the bank an advantage. “It is important that you are at windows before people start queueing,” he said.

Chong says AI can change perceptions
about chatbots.

Luzanne Chong, Head of Customer Experience, FWD, another Active.Ai customer, said that digital is the way to go for insurance. “We leverage digital to change the way people think about insurance,” she said. “AI can deliver information that is relevant and contextual.”

Chong observed that chatbots are thought to be simple, automated ways to answer frequently-asked questions, but are actually quite complex. Besides looking through a repository of data to respond with accurate answers to questions and following preset workflows to complete actions, they can also be predictive, suggesting additional tasks or products, she said. “AI can simplify all that and help people get financially educated,” she said.

FWD's Active.Ai chatbot has not yet launched, but will be able to improve the customer experience, she said. As an example, she said some overseas travel medical claims have as two separate claims, whereas the chatbot would be able to identify all of the consumer's policies, choose the relevant policy to be used for filing the claims, and then help the consumer complete both claims at the same time.

“Consumers don't want complexity,” she said. “The AI should be as intelligent as a human should be.”

Ravishankar said potential customers typically have fears about the security, and are unsure how they can respond to unstructured conversations. While companies with legacy infrastructure are concerned that their technology is not ready, digital companies want to know what is possible, he added.

Sharma added that companies may worry about unsupervised learning, which can be how AI models learn. “They want to be sure your model is getting trained properly,” he said. “There must be human intervention to say what you want it to learn and don't want it to learn.”

The speakers did not feel that AI will replace the human element at financial institutions. “When the human is combined with a machine, you get the best output,” said Sharma.

Ravishankar said, “It is not about how much cost I can save by removing people, but how I can double my customer base and do it in two years instead of four years.”