Banking on bots
Improving the customer experience with bots
You may have seen the recent announcements from #Microsoft’s CEO declaring that bots are the next big thing with the company creating a platform for the creation of bots on other platforms – including its own Skype Instant Messenger channel. Following this, Facebook also premiered their platform at their f8 conference.
I’ve been looking at the technology from a FinTech perspective and have recently come across an exciting startup, Action.ai, that is specializing in the creation of intelligent chat bots that can be used to extend and enhance existing commerce channels. These #bots are not the clunky rules-based bots currently being debuted, but make use of Natural Language Processing, a category of artificial intelligence used to elicit meaning from words and dialogue.
The recent popularity of chat bots is due to the fact that a great number of people are spending a good deal of their time in Instant Messaging platforms, chatting with friends, privately debating, even playing games. Facebook just announced 900m monthly users on Messenger with 60billion messages sent every single month.
We got chatting about the crossover with #FinTech, and this video provides a taster of the potential in #Banking:
The more interesting chat bot technology will algorithmically learn based on instructions taught to it, and interacts with users using natural language. Bots learn to understand what you write. The recent announcements by Microsoft and Facebook along with the likes of Kik Messenger and Line, and the opening of IM platforms to third-party services, herald the start of a boom that parallels the arrival of smartphone apps.
Intelligent chat bots provide an intuitive end user experience without boundaries in which transactions can be made whilst on the move with a mobile phone. The premise is simple, an intelligent chat bot doesn’t require you to make a banking transaction and get all of the variables right or ask for the transaction to be made using a geeky language. If you miss something important, like the source account, it simply asks you or even makes an intelligent assumption that you’re talking about your principal account – a bit like a bank-teller would confirm. You could message an intelligent banking bot in the same way you’d message a friend, and it will understand you via its nifty artificial intelligence engine.
The AI takes care of all of the tedious detail for you
Conversational Commerce allows you to do pretty-much anything that’s possible with an app, such as making financial transactions and just via a text-based interface. There’s no need for tediously specified instructions or worrying about spelling errors or writing in code or a particular format. None of that will matter if you undertake financial instructions using Conversational Commerce. And the SaaS model allows seamless portability to other channels.
The #AI takes care of all of the detail for you, recognizing what you want to do from a normal textual dialogue, like “I wanna stop a transaction”. Easy. It knows you’re talking about your bank, knows your account details, and knows that you likely want to go to stop a direct debit. Now imagine the possibilities, and you’ll see why everyone’s getting so excited about it. It’s like Siri on steroids and, as a bonus, nobody gets to hear you clumsily and repeatedly speaking out loud into your phone like you’ve gone clinically insane. But we need quality bots.
Intelligent Chatbots can act as channel extensions or supplement existing channels, and can automatically triage to a real person when needed, just like in the Action.ai video. The promise of ubiquitous computing and ambient banking looks even more likely with this technology, accessing FinTech transactions in a frictionless way, from anywhere and at any time. Why shouldn’t you be able to access your bank balance directly from your xBox by simply asking a bot, and why shouldn’t you be given the option to open a dialogue with a real person during a transaction? And where best to receive triggered alerts for transactions, at real time, with the option to then ask about that event?
Well, if you embrace the future of technology, you’ll be excited to know that it’s a world that’s not so far away, especially with the major platforms opening their doors to allow software developers to create intelligent bots. And where is that channel best located? Why, in your pocket, of course. On your mobile phone.
The technology potential is enormous
Finally, there’s no reason why this bot technology needs to interact solely with just text. Not only can a bot send you a picture of the hotel you’re thinking of, or the taxi rating and a picture of your driver, but it can send you video – and video now can be made interactive. #Skype’s new APIs available through Microsoft’s Cognitive Services are offering some very wizzy functionality, and it won’t be long before you can ask to change the color of a clothing item worn by a catwalk model you’re watching on your phone through Skype video. And why not check into a physical store by simply sending a message? Your phone will be doing it all – and probably just using a single app, an IM Messenger.
So watch out for #ConversationalCommerce. It’s heading your way, strong and hard. It won’t of course replace all of our standard high street nor our eCommerce and FinTech experiences, but it’ll add to the mix, and make the whole experience richer and potentially more fun.
