Virtual assistants

After scrambling to launch bots in the early pandemic, banks including Fifth Third and KeyBank are taking the time to thoughtfully design intelligent digital assistants with better navigation and seamless handoffs to human agents.

Their chatbots are diverting calls away from call centers and helping bring in deposits, the banks say, as the adoption, maturity and usefulness of the technology improve. 

The Australian bank has co-developed a portal to all the knowledge trapped inside multiple virtual assistants throughout the company.

The suburban New York bank says Skye, its conversational artificial intelligence assistant, is doing the work of 100 full-time employees.

The AskResearch virtual assistant helps the company's employees quickly find specific information buried in proprietary research to facilitate their work with clients. It's a creative solution to data-retrieval problems many banking companies face.

Absa Group is drawing on global training data from the fintech Kasisto and annotators who review conversations with clients to help in fine-tuning its virtual assistant.

Bank of America is applying a familiar arsenal — including APIs and its popular virtual assistant, Erica — to online business banking, cross-border payments and cash management in an effort to modernize those services.

Mobile and online banking technologies that the Toronto bank previously rolled out, including a virtual assistant developed by Kasisto and money management tools made by Moven, have become much more popular since the arrival of COVID-19.

Russia's largest bank is reinventing itself as a technology company and selling its own consumer electronic devices. Its chief tech officer says the moves are all about developing broader, more enduring customer relationships that the bank controls fully.