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An artificial revolution AI


As FIs predict and plan for the way consumers will manage their money in the future, AI is high on agendas for 2017 and beyond. Hannah Prevett reports


to an airline for a frustrating 45 minutes he spotted an opportunity to improve customer service. With the help of artificial intelligence (AI), many functions could be automated “to make life easier for everyone,” he thought.


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Jain and his two co-founders, Ravina Mutha and Sanjay Jayasankar, started Enterprise Bot in the summer of 2016 but instead of the leisure sector decided to focus on financial services. “Banks have the exact same problem; you call in and it takes forever to get responses,” says Jain.


The trio’s solution was to create chatbots that are powered by natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning algorithms. The proposition was clear: to create a system for financial services that is able to understand and act upon customer queries and is easy to integrate into existing infrastructure. The bots would be more human; able to understand conversations in a way that users could ask follow-up questions the way they would with a real person.


Financial services is an exciting, thriving market, explains Jain, and banks are already seeing the potential for AI across their operations. It’s a captive market, says the entrepreneur. “We were around at the perfect time and one of the reasons we started the company was because we were getting inbound interest. In the last six months we’ve spoken to people in the UK, Australia and all over the world because there’s such a dearth of AI companies solving this problem. The need is universal; the need to respond to customers faster and in a more efficient way.”


Having rolled out its first pilot with a banking partner in September 2016, Enterprise Bot is now working with a number of tier one banks in the UK, Switzerland and


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hen Pranay Jain was kept on hold


the Netherlands. The fact that banks are embracing AI technology comes as no surprise to Alan McIntyre, Senior Managing Director for banking at Accenture, and author of the firm’s recent report Banking Technology Vision 2017. The survey of over 600 bankers found that 76% believed that within three years banks will deploy AI as their primary method for interacting with customers.


McIntyre says that many banks believe AI will allow them to offer a more personalised service to customers, something that’s been lacking in recent years due to the shrinking of branch networks. “If you go back to the 50s or 60s, a lot of people were used to walking into their local branch and they were known individually to the manager and the people behind the counters. People feel that got lost over the last 20 years and they’re not known as an individual. One of the promises of AI is that you will be known as an individual. So when you dial into a call centre it’s not going to be a nameless, faceless interaction; the person at the end of the phone will be supported by technologies that will help them know a lot more about you and interact with you to offer a personalised service,” says McIntyre. “Likewise when you walk into a face to face interaction, AI can help support a far more fluid conversation.”


The reception amongst customers is generally positive, says McIntyre, as a precedent for automatic advice has already been set by companies such as Amazon and Netflix with their recommendation engines. Accenture research has found that three quarters of consumers would be comfortable with robotic advice around banking products.


A lot of this is down to trust. “They trust that the advice is unbiased because it isn’t being influenced in the same way by incentive schemes or high pressured sales in the


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