Many people have asked: at what rate are banks and finance institutions adopting chatbots and RPA? According to Avi Benezra the CTO of SnatchBot, this is happening very fast now, thanks to the way in which technology is now being integrated.
With the US banking industry alone now managing close to $17.9 trillion in assets, very few sectors come close to banking. Banking and finance involve managing many individual, business and corporate accounts, responding to many customer queries, accepting new customers and performing many repetitive tasks and calculations. These tasks have often required many employees who tend to be slow and to err. Customers have always needed to wait for a long time for each process. With the rise of virtual banking solutions, banks and other financial industry businesses now have to fight to remain competitive and to keep their customers happy. That is why they are automating customer services through the use of chatbots and repetitive tasks through the use of robotic process automation (RPA). I asked Avi Benezra, and his team at SnatchBot a few questions about banking and chatbots:
How are chatbots revolutionizing banking and finance?
Benezra explains that People no longer need to make phone calls and hold on for a long time while waiting for an agent to become available. Artificial intelligence now makes it easy for customers to hold conversations through chatbots that banks and financial institutions are deploying on their websites and on social media.
Chatbots have been used by several banks for a few years now. Bank of America’s Erica, for example, has been able to check on account balances, and provide money saving and debt management tips. Other institutions use chatbots for these purposes and for peer-to-peer money transfer. Those are basics. Now there are AI-driven chatbots that can perform more sophisticated banking, providing very personalized services for customers including the emotional and contextual understanding. While solving customer account problems, the bots can also work with employees and provide support to the IT department as well.
News. Financial institutions and banks are using chatbots to share security warnings and news about new products and services. Customers can respond and ask questions. By keeping customers engaged and answering their questions, the institutions keep their customers informed and happy.
Customer queries. When people have questions or problems that are related to their accounts, sometimes they cannot wait for business hours before getting answers. For example, loss of debit and credit cards has to be reported instantly. Chatbots are made available to quickly react to the reports and queries and to provide answers 24 hours per day. That way accounts are protected and customers are kept happy.
How is RPA changing banking and finance?
Banking and finance involve many repetitive tasks and calculations. Instead of employing many people to perform those tasks at high cost, institutions are now using robotic process automation (RPA) for faster and more accurate performance. Here are the benefits of using RPA.
Employees are freed
Instead of spending time performing repetitive tasks, employees are free to provide high-end services for customers and work on value-adding projects.
Compliance management
Financial institutions have stringent laws to comply with. They spend a lot of time and money on compliance and they pay hefty fines for non-compliance. Now RPA is making compliance and risk management easier by reading the lengthy compliance documents and generating suspicious activity reports (SARS) faster.
New customers
Capturing data for new customers is a laborious process if done manually. RPA can extract a lot of data from source documents faster through optical character recognition and compare it to the data in the forms. This saves time and costs for the institution and saves time for customers.
Account opening process
RPA makes the opening of new accounts faster, easier and accurate with better data quality.
Mortgage lending
RPA makes the whole process of mortgage lending faster, and that includes loan initiation, document processing, calculations, and quality control. With less manual work to do, employees can perform more value-adding tasks.
Loan and credit card processing
Loan and credit card processing used to be slow and tedious. With RPA, processes that used to require days to check and approve have been reduced to a 10-15-minute task.
Suspicious banking transactions
RPA can also detect suspicious banking transactions with more accuracy than the human eye.
Account closure
Many accounts are closed every month mostly due to compliance problems. Instead of allowing these accounts to close, RPA can automatically send reminders to account holders so that they can submit all required documents.
The way forward with AI chatbots and RPA
“No-coding” chatbots is widely responsible for higher adoption rates in chatbot technology, since there is no need to hire developers. The combination of advanced AI chatbots and RPA is making the work of banking and financial institutions easier, faster and more efficient. Institutions in this industry can become more competitive by being more responsive to queries and faster in all banking processes. In the process of adding technology, they will naturally get rid of many human employees and reduce their salary and wage costs. The result is improved profitability with increased customer satisfaction.
Development of chatbots can be costly and time-consuming – and as discussed, it is now outdated. Today institutions can purchase ready-made banking chatbot templates from a leading marketplace (The Bot Store) at SnatchBot and customize them to their needs without the need for coding.
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