EXCLUSIVE— Providing “conversational banking” isn’t quite as easy now that most customer conversations take place over digital, which is why multiple banks have turned towards chatbots and AI.
Take TD Bank, which announced this week that it would be leveraging KAI Banking, the “conversational AI platform” developed by Kasisto, within its mobile banking app. KAI is developed to provide AI-powered, data-driven customer experiences that seem to mimic the old way of chatting with a personal banker.
“[KAI] providers full, instant banking knowledge. It will enable new types of experiences, new banking use cases, inherently rooted in the power of human language,” Zor Gorelov, CEO of Kasisto, told Bank Innovation.
KAI can enable experiences like monitoring a customer’s spending habits “without the hassle of menus and buttons,” according to Kasisto. Crafting those new customer means going outside the traditional banking channels, which is starting to include mobile apps, as more and more users are starting use third-party integrations or services for their needs.
TD will be starting its rollout of KAI within its own app, but that’s not to say the technology couldn’t be applied to other channels, like Facebook Messenger or Alexa, in the future, Rizwan Khalfan, EVP, chief digital and payments officer at TD Bank, told Bank Innovation.
“The customer [now] chooses how they want to interact with us, and what we want to do with KAI is provide a higher value of customer service,” Khalfan said. According to the bank, TD was the first bank to globally use Facebook Messenger for customer services, as well as the first bank in Canada to launch a Twitter chatbot.
The bank is planning on continuing that innovation with KAI, whose technology could also be applied to other areas of TD in the future, such as its business banking clients as opposed to just retail services. The bank “could see [KAI] add to business banking,” Khalfan said.
TD Bank will be rolling out KAI for its 6.5 million mobile active users (the bank has 11.6 million digital active users) in the first half of 2018.