What Are The Top Use Cases For Chatbots In Banking?

Chatbot vendors in the banking industry can help make everyday banking tasks easier. An AI chatbot makes it easy for customers to:

Retrieve account balance and information such as account and routing numbers

Get historical spending analysis and budgeting recommendations

Receive bill pay alerts and payment notifications

Receive fraud, repeat charges and suspicious activity notifications

Transfer money, buy stocks and mutual funds

Report upcoming travel

Report lost or stolen cards

Activate new cards

Check rewards and points balances

Learn how conversational AI is rewriting the rules for banking and fintech in this eBook.

Which banks have chatbots? A roundup of the 10 best-of-the-best banking chatbot solutions

Here are some of the most well-known banking chatbots.

Ally Assist from Ally Bank

One of the first banks to launch a chatbot, Ally Bank rolled out Ally Assist in 2015 in an effort to provide users with seamless personalized customer service to manage their account. Accessible within the Ally Bank iPhone app, Ally Assist performs bill payment, transfers and account information requests. The bank also launched an Ally Skill on Amazon’s Alexa giving people perform simple banking tasks via voice commands.

Amy from HSBC

HSBC’s Virtual Assistant Chatbot Amy is available on the bank’s website on various product pages. Amy understands English, Traditional and Simplified Chinese and helps customers get instant answers to common questions on the bank’s products and services.

Ceba from Commonwealth Bank (Australia)

Ceba is a virtual banking assistant that answers a range of day-to-day banking questions. Ceba is available on the bank’s app and Website. Ceba is one of the only banking chatbots to have human escalation and directs customers to other channels based on their specific need.

Citi Bot SG from Citi

Citi Bank’s Citi Bot SG is a chatbot that enables customers to ask about basic account information through Facebook Messenger. Customers can get answers to questions around account balance, transactions, rewards and payment information for credit cards, checking and savings accounts.

Clari from TD

Available within the TD banking app, Clari answers common banking questions. Clari can find information on spending, bank accounts and more. Banking customers can ask about opening an investing account, account balance, historic spending and categories, and sending money.

Eno from Capital One

Available on the bank’s website, mobile app and SMS, Capital One’s digital assistant Eno uses sophisticated natural language processing to understand 2,200 different ways someone might ask for their balance. Eno also proactively reaches out if a bill is higher than normal, if it suspects fraud, or if it detects a particularly high tip. Another unique feature is monitoring free-trials to remind customers before they end.

Erica from Bank of America

Available within the BofA app, the virtual financial assistant Erica is designed to help customers more easily manage their money. Within the interactive interface, Erica provides reward and account balances, spending summaries, refund confirmations and credit scores. She can also identify duplicate charges and send bill reminders.

The AI-powered chatbot’s capabilities don’t stop there: Erica helps support BofA subsidiary Merrill clients through insights on portfolio performance, trading, investment balances, quotes and holdings.

In 2020, Erica helped more than 5 million customers complete over 75 million requests. Since launching in 2020, Erica has helped 15 million customers with over 175 million requests. Every day, Erica engages in approximately 400,000 interactions.

Eva from HDFC

Eva helps customers with everyday banking needs: checking on a loan status, facilitating payments and getting instant answers to FAQs. Eva can also help customers apply for various loans.

HARO and DORI from Hang Seng Bank

With the ability to communicate in Chinese and English, and also understand Cantonese as well as the mixing of English and Chinese, the two bots from Hang Seng Bank in Hong Kong get retail customers instant answers to a variety of needs. HARO and DORI use a combination of natural language processing and machine learning to have human-like conversations, helping banking customers get answers in real-time.

HARO stands for ‘Helpful; Attentive; Responsive; Omni” and interacts with customers on the bank’s website, mobile app and WhatsApp and answers questions related to mortgage, personal loan, credit card, medical insurance and travel insurance services.

Available on Facebook Messenger, DORI (‘Dining; Offers; Rewards; Interactive’) helps customers discover shopping and dining offers.

NOMI from Royal Bank of Canada

NOMI is a banking chatbot that hails from the Royal Bank of Canada, the country’s largest bank. NOMI is a chatbot that sends alerts, reminders, and tailored insights based on a person’s banking habits. Available in the RBC mobile app, it provides tools to help people manage day-to-day spending, including a calculated budget recommendation based on unique spending habits.

The use of virtual assistants by financial institutions to help banking customers save money, manage their bank accounts and XYZ is on the rise. Customers increasingly expect effortless and proactive customer support and banking bots are delivering the experience that customers expect.

Find out what your ROI will be if you build an AI chatbot. Try our free chatbot ROI calculator.

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Disruptive fintech companies and digital-only challenger banks have shaken up an industry once plagued with little differentiation amongst products and poor customer experiences. Upstart banks and financial services companies like Brex, Chime, Monzo, and Wealthfront are digital-native and designed to provide an online customer experience on par with the best consumer apps. This is a point not lost even on legacy bank executives: 75% of banking executives believe the most critical impact fintech companies will have is driving an increased focus on the customer¹.

In fact, only half of the respondents from the banking sector (53%) believe their organizations are consumer-centric, compared with over 80% of fintechs². Fintechs need to provide superior online and in-app customer support in addition to the smooth user experiences (such as sign-up flows) they provide in their products. This ease of use plus strong support builds long-term loyalty in the face of fierce competition for consumer wallets. Fintech companies are turning to AI to scale customer service, automating resolutions to repeatable tickets. AI also powers in-app and proactive service offerings that anticipate customer needs and resolve problems faster without taking users out of their flow.

Frictionless CX for fintech companies is driving adoption

Today’s banking and finance draw parallels to the media industry, where we’ve seen streaming upstarts steal eyeballs and attention from the legacy media behemoths. Consumers are realizing they don’t need all of the bundled extras and hidden fees from cable companies and are cutting the cord at alarming rates in favor of unbundled and streaming services like Netflix and Hulu.

This same shift is happening in financial services. Consumers are flocking to challenger banks like Chime, simple-to-use retirement apps like Betterment and Wealthfront, and frictionless financial services like Venmo to handle simple banking needs. Their success has come because, according to Deloitte, fintechs “developed a product offering and channel experience that targeted the points of the value chain where incumbents’ weaknesses were most exposed and often not easy to fix. Most commonly, this was low satisfaction with customer service levels, broken digital account opening and servicing journeys, and complex product terms with various layers of hidden add-on fees.³“

Today, 1 in 4 people under the age of 37 have an account with a digital-only challenger bank like Revolut, Monzo and NuBankk⁴. And while the United States has lagged in terms of adoption as compared to Europe, Asia, and LATAM, US consumer appetite for alternate providers of financial services is picking up, driven, in part, by the user-friendly experiences designed to save customers time. One example of this is with opening an account with a financial services company. Opening a new account with the UK’s Monzo bank and the US’s N26 is done in less than 5 minutes on a mobile phone⁵. This compares to opening an account with a traditional bank, which may require in-branch meetings, faxes and paperwork, and multiple days for approval.

Poor service drives churn in fintech

With more competition, churn remains a major issue for fintech companies. One study found that one day after signing up for financial apps, only 34.8% of users remain; a week later, this drops to 14.9%; and three months later to just 3.4%⁵. Respondents consistently cited “poor service” as their reason for churning off apps⁶.

Fintech companies need to meet the demands of the modern consumer who doesn’t like waiting, craves simplicity and ease, and is often completing tasks on their smartphones. By prioritizing existing customer happiness and providing the support that they expect, fintech companies will grow revenue by reducing churn. This is because seven in 10 US consumers say they’ve spent more money to do business with a company that delivers excellent service, and 95% of consumers cite customer service as important in their choice of and loyalty to a brand.

The four pillars of excellent fintech customer service

Digital-first millennials who have expectations for truly seamless, immediate and convenient customer support are the primary and earliest adopters of fintechs. To retain these customers, fintech companies need to implement four key customer service strategies.

Provide meaningful, 1:1 in-app support: While omni-channel support is essential, for fintech companies in particular, most of the interaction with the customer is taking place within apps. Don’t force a person to exit the app, call a support line or send an email to get in touch. Providing support within the apps where services are provided gives customers access to the information they need at their fingertips. Deploy live chat functionality to enable a person to receive support in the exact moment of need.
Be always-on and always-available: Customers run into issues 24/7/365. And especially when money is involved, customers crave immediate support. Don’t restrict customers to business hours or keep them waiting for a response. Respond immediately, no matter if it’s after-hours, the weekend or a holiday.
Leverage AI to automate resolutions to basic issues: Self-service is core to all fintech experiences and a key reason people become customers in the first place. An AI-powered customer service chatbot can immediately resolve issues, including resetting passwords, checking account balances, transferring funds between accounts or paying monthly bills. With AI chatbots managing many repeatable tasks, live agents focus on more complex or urgent tasks. AI chatbots differ from first-generation bots as they enable customers to engage in natural, human-like conversation, not tied to rigid decision trees.
Get out in front of issues with proactive service: Solving issues before customers even know they exist brings the idea of convenience to a new level. By leveraging AI, fintech companies can understand when a problem is likely to arise, when a customer might get frustrated or when specific information would be valuable. Fintechs can then preemptively intervene before a customer has to reach out.

As soon as an account is set up, for instance, fintech companies can reach out with precise information drips to proactively answer the most common questions after onboarding. After 3-6 months, a person’s questions have likely changed, so targeted education can reduce customer frustration. To implement proactive service, identify friction areas, the top customer service tickets that arise along the customer journey, and differentiation amongst customer segments. You can then identify low-impact, high-value opportunities to offer proactive service.

Closing: How AI can help fintech companies excel at customer success

As competition in the financial services industry heats up with new entrants and incumbent banks taking massive steps to reinvent their customer experience, differentiation increasingly comes from customer service. Meeting customer expectations for immediate, convenient and frictionless support is directly correlated with long-term customer happiness and growth.

To turn customer support into a competitive edge and meet quick-rising demands for quick, convenient and personal resolutions, fintech companies need to bring AI into the workforce to resolve issues immediately, and introduce always-on, proactive and in-app service.

Find out what your ROI will be if you build an AI chatbot. Try our free chatbot ROI calculator.

Are you a fintech company looking to create frictionless customer service interactions? Get in touch for a demo today!