Pradeep Tigulla, Author at BotCore

How Can Traditional Banks Challenge the Fintech Space With Conversational AI?

Pradeep Tigulla — Mon, 05 Sep 2022 11:45:26 +0000

How Can Traditional Banks Challenge the Fintech Space With Conversational AI?

In today’s highly digitized business landscape, customers have come to expect seamless engagement across the broad spectrum of banking and financial services. More than two years into the pandemic, thanks to powerful advancements in artificial intelligence, automation, machine learning, blockchain, and other technologies, a new wave of digitally-enabled financial firms have taken the entire banking industry by storm.

Fintech firms, also known as the digital challenger banks (Venmo, CashApp, PayPal), have quickly exploited traditional banks’ inability to scale up their digital transformation initiatives. Long branch queues, highly complex application forms, cumbersome login procedures, stringent guidelines, and inconsistent banking portal designs for different use cases have deterred customers from engaging with traditional banks.

Instead, banking customers have now made a steady move toward fintech firms providing an easy, cohesive, and well-designed suite of online and mobile banking services. From opening a bank account to making immediate peer-to-peer transfers to shopping online, executing international transfers, or making contactless payments, the ability to effortlessly perform common banking tasks from the convenience of one’s home and at the fingertips has made third-party fintech services a go-to choice for the younger, new generation of customers.

Research shows that 88% of incumbent financial institutions believe that part of their business will be lost to standalone fintech companies in the next five years.

However, all is not lost for traditional banks. To ensure frictionless banking experiences, reduce customer dropout, and build unified digital banking practices that can help traditional banks challenge fintech firms, it’s time to adopt conversational AI in banking, more popularly known as conversational banking.

Let’s explore more.

Introducing Conversational AI in Banking

Conversational AI in banking can help traditional banks challenge fintech firms. AI-enabled chatbots in banking can recognize, understand, and resolve simple and complex requests while avoiding back and forth for the customers.

An intuitive conversational interface, unmatched speed and convenience, and the ability to offer a wide range of banking services on various digital channels, including social messaging apps, SMS, IVR, and the web, make conversational banking one of the strongest tools to challenge up and coming fintech firms.

Legacy banking systems are not capable of supporting the changing market expectations of today’s banking customers. With chatbots in banking, traditional banks can offer services akin to fintech firms while allowing banking agents to focus on other critical tasks that require higher attention.

Some of the features that chatbots in banking offer include the following —

1. 24x7 accessibility

Customer dynamics have changed drastically during the pandemic. Coming across a customer who needs banking services or answers to basic banking queries at an odd 2 am at night is not surprising in today’s times.

Even when bank branches and call centers have closed shop for the day, banking chatbots can help customers get answers to their queries and help them with any support they need 24×7.

2. A cohesive and intuitive experience.

Conversational AI in banking can help customers access a range of banking services via text or voice. Specifically, banking chatbots can overcome the hassles of traditional IVR systems and guide customers through everyday banking services such as money transfers, loan applications, blocking lost cards, closing and opening accounts, etc.

Also known as conversational IVR, banking chatbots integrated within traditional IVR systems can improve first-call resolution by quickly providing personalized answers and solutions to customer queries.

Customers are freed from the hassle of filling up long, complicated forms. Instead, chatbots can handle their queries, automate transactions, and comprehend what the customer really wants using natural language processing (NLP) and natural language understanding (NLU) technologies.

What’s more, contact center agents can leverage chatbots to draw up relevant background information on the customer, thus ensuring speedy query resolution.

3. Multilingual and omnichannel

Banking chatbots can be made available over a plethora of channels in the customers’ preferred languages. Technologies such as AI, NLP, and context management make it possible for chatbots to provide consistent experiences across all channels while ensuring customers can easily switch channels without having to start over.

Consistent conversational banking experiences leave a positive impression of your bank and its services. Moreover, allowing customers the option to chat in their preferred language makes them comfortable with your bank’s services, keeps them engaged, and is more likely to help banks retain them.

Personalized banking at the fingertips

Conversational banking chatbots can provide scalable, cost-effective, and personalized banking services at the customers’ fingertips. Customer support bots in banking can integrate with backend systems and also form comprehensive customer personas to act as “personal financial advisors.”

Not only can banks then offer personalized financial insights and product recommendations, but they can also design products and services tailored to their customer’s needs.

Additionally, banks can drive revenue and sales by offering customers products they are eligible for but aren’t fully aware of.

Sneaking in a quick example of a banking chatbot

How can Acuvate help?

At Acuvate, we help clients build intelligent chatbots using our accelerator BotCore, Microsoft’s Power Virtual Agents.

Interested to know more about Conversational AI or chatbots. Connect with us today.

The post How Can Traditional Banks Challenge the Fintech Space With Conversational AI? appeared first on BotCore.

Top use cases of Chatbots in the Banking and Finance Industry

Pradeep Tigulla — Thu, 04 Aug 2022 08:11:20 +0000

Top Use Cases of Chatbots in the Banking and Finance Industry

Chatbots have come a long way since the first time they were used by a banking application in 2015. With advancements in AI, NLP, and new communication channels like Google Home, Alexa, and social media platforms, they are now widely being used by almost all popular banks and financial institutions.

These ChatBots perform various repetitive tasks easily and accurately. Further, they can be personalized for each of the customers.

The conversational bots can be text-based or voice-based. They can be accessed from a mobile app, a banking website, social media messaging platforms, or voice-based personal digital assistants.

Generally, ChatBots used by banks are more popular in the finance and banking industry. However, chatbots are used for more complicated and personalized tasks beyond conventional uses.

Though as bank customers using digital services we all experience ChatBots, they are also used by employees working in financial institutions to retrieve information easily. When we go to a bank to learn more about a policy the employee retrieves information not from big bundles of paper on their desks, but rather from the organization’s memory using a ChatBot.

In 2017, Acuvate published a blog on top use cases of chatbots in the banking and finance industry. A lot has changed in these five years. They can guess the information we seek, suggest policies and initiatives, and are more convenient to use.

Here are 5 ways banks and financial institutions are using chatbots

1. Addressing Customer’s concerns

Unlike banking personnel, digital tools like websites are available for customers 24×7. To make it further easy for users, chatbots integrated into websites and mobile apps can answer the most common questions faster and with fewer clicks.

For example, reporting a hacking attempt, locking your account to stop a hacking attempt, or finding out more information about an unidentified debit would previously require the customer to log in to the website, search for the option, and take action. These are the most common tasks that a banking chatbot in the banking website or social media app can answer in just a few seconds. Since the app is on your mobile phone, verifying your credentials is easy. Here’s an example

The ambit of the operations a chatbot can perform has greatly widened these days with advancements in security systems and technologies. ChatBot interactions are now more personalized and natural.

2. Retaining old customers and expanding customer base

Customer engagement is beyond human interactions between customers and employees at the office. With more customers using digital tools like websites, apps embedded in mobile phones, and other personal digital assistants like Google Home or Alexa, each of these tools have ChatBots to answer customers and cater to their needs in time.

These tools simplify various processes and save time and effort. ChatBots are integral to all digital tools to engage with a large number of customers and provide personalized services. They define the quality of service and ease of operations a financial institution provides its customers.

For example, ChatBots identify new customers and present them with options of information they are more likely to seek. For older customers, ChatBots identify them, address them by their name, and with knowledge of their account details, they present a different set of actions for each of them. With advanced ChatBots, customers can’t say if they’re talking to a human or a digital assistant.

When embedded in IoT digital assistants like Alexa or Google Home, the latest advancements in NLP ( Natural Language Processing) technologies help the audio-based Chatbots provide a pleasant conversational experience to customers along with information they asked for and may be interested in.

3. Generating useful Marketing Leads

Modern ChatBots backed with Artificial Intelligence can build interest in a financial institution’s products and services. Chatbots are the perfect tools to implement digitalized marketing techniques to find new customers and sustain old ones. They are effective in keeping customers active by providing the convenience of being there for them always.

The ChatBots collect information from customers and provide them with information on various initiatives that are likely to interest them. This helps in identifying potential customers and in growing the customer base.

4. Recommendations and upselling

As the services of banking and financial institutions grew wider, it is important to let the right customers know about the right policies and initiatives. Intelligent digital systems like chatbots can more accurately identify interested customers. Chatbots make it easier to maintain customer profiles, identify who wants to buy other products, and get feedback on existing products and services.

Moreover, these Chatbots learn and adapt to situations. Hence they learn more about customers and get better and more accurate over time.

5. Personal Financial Assistant

Chatbots help users track their spending and receive a timely reminder of impending payments. Payments can be automated to avoid late fees. They do help customers refrain from overspending and provide regular reports of their expenses.

The information collected by chatbots can be used to profile customers based on their financial needs, status, and expenses. They especially make loan approvals and investment decisions easier and more manageable.

How to build the most reliable chatbots?

Chatbots reduce costs, no doubt, but that’s not the main advantage. They provide a better customer experience and make essential processes simpler. Every bank and the financial institution needs a chatbot.

However, these simple solutions are not so easy to build. As with any other financial system, since they involve sensitive information and must be error-free, they should be built with care and by trustable experts. Moreover, unlike physical assets, digital infrastructure like chatbots need to be updated continuously to address changing needs of customers and to stay relevant and competitive in the market.

BotCore - the powerful enterprise bot builder platform from Acuvate

Over the past few years, we have helped several enterprises build & launch bots to meet the needs of their employees, customers, and vendors. After observing several enterprise scenarios large landscape of user intents, and common pain points across various departments, we spent more than 15 person-years of research, design & development on building a highly flexible and powerful enterprise bot builder platform – “BotCore”.

BotCore is the perfect accelerator that enables banks and financial institutions to train, build, and launch customized conversational bots powered by artificial intelligence. Using “Cognitive Abstraction” it can leverage an AI service available today and are scalable for future services.

BotCore today powers chatbots at several Fortune 100 & large enterprises. To learn more about how Botcare can help your business in providing superior customer engagement, please mail us at

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