The Role of Automated Processes in Digital Banking

The role of automated processes in digital banking is most visible when we look at the challenges that financial institutions currently face, many of which can be solved by automating certain tasks. Let’s see them now.

1. Lengthy, Inconvenient Customer Onboarding

With more and more customers joining the mobile-only group, customer onboarding becomes a strenuous task. It takes time, involves numerous rigorous procedures, and might discourage many potential customers. The answer to that is simplification, one of the ways to boost online sales in banking in general.

With automation, you can make the whole onboarding process much simpler for the customer. Automated biometric identification will let customers go through this step quickly, and systems working on performing repetitive tasks will reduce delays, making the customer happier and more likely to go through the whole process without abandoning it.

2. Lack of Personalization

Customer-centricity is the principle of business right now, and banks cannot avoid it. Yet, with so many clients, it often becomes difficult to personalize the offer or sales proposals to each customer, making them feel less cared for.

Automation, combined with AI, might also be of help in this case. Automated data analytics processes can provide your agents with detailed info about each customer, summarized in a nutshell, or even generate product recommendations tailored to the needs of each of your clients.

3. Rising Operational Costs

Renting space, purchasing properties, paying salaries to numerous low-skilled agents – all these operational costs grow rapidly, decreasing the profitability of banking institutions. Optimizing processes in digital banking and automating them might help cut those costs down.

Take, for instance, an AI assistant – a set of solutions helping customer agents solve queries more quickly, like AI Helper and AI Prompter. The former helps cut down the time spent by the agent on preparing the message and searching for information, while the latter lets experienced agents navigate through bank regulations, fee tables, and promotional offers more quickly. In the end, both of these functions improve the productivity of your agents, letting them handle more queries, reducing the demand for agents in your banks, and all the costs associated with hiring more of them (energy, water, space rental, etc.).

4. Security Threats

Security in online banking is one of the main challenges that financial institutions face nowadays, with the number of threats and access points constantly increasing. How can automation help with that?

Machine-learning-based automated processes may be introduced to monitor the security of the network. Such systems can be taught based on historical data and send alerts when they find indicators of malicious activity.

What Processes in Digital Banking Can Be Automated?

Processes can be automated in almost any area of digital banking, though they might take different forms or require additional technology (e.g., AI). Here’s a brief overview of where you can implement automation.

• Customer support – Through chatbots and AI assistants, to improve the speed and accessibility of support.
• Loan decisioning – Automated systems may analyze the data to make loan approvals more quickly.
• Account servicing – If certain processes (like opening/closing an account) are automated, customers don’t have to visit a physical branch to manage their account, and the employees don’t have to bother with the simple tasks (e.g., activating credit cards) manually.
• Fraud detection – Automated data analytics based on AI is an excellent eKYC solution that helps detect fraud based on patterns and historical data.
• Security – As mentioned before, automated processes might be implemented into security monitoring for threat detection.

How LiveBank Helps in Optimizing Processes in Digital Banking Customer Service?

So, what about our digital banking solutions? How can you use them to automate processes in your bank? Here’s a short list of the possibilities:

• AI assistant – Our AI assistant for banking is a tool that will let you automate your customer service. It can be fed with all your regulations and procedures and solve queries without involving the customer service agents. It will also suggest products for the particular customer and help you adjust the tone of voice in chat to deliver the best possible customer experience.
• eKYC – LiveBank’s eKYC solution, on the other hand, offers you the option to leave the customer verification manual or automate it (partially or fully), making this customer service element more satisfying for the customer and quicker for the agent.
• Opti- and omnichannel approach – Finally, our omnichannel banking platform will help you automate data processing across channels to deliver consistent customer experience across all channels and pick the preferred medium of communication for each customer.

Optimizing Processes in Digital Banking: Conclusions

Banks are facing numerous challenges that can be solved with automated processes, the technologies for which are widely available. Investing in digital banking process optimization and automation is crucial since it pays off in higher customer satisfaction, quicker customer service, and lower operational costs. However, we mustn’t forget about the human touch. Contact with an agent is, in many cases, the best solution available, so the key is to balance between automation and manual processes.

You may also read: The Impact of Mobile Apps on Customer Service in Digital Banking

AI Banking Assistant in Customer Support: The Road to Convenience

As we have established in our article on human conversations in digital banking, nowadays, customers strive for convenience. Therefore, banks need to find ways to simplify their procedures while making them quicker for the customers.

Virtual banking assistants are a way to do so, and our own AI tool for banking proves to be an excellent example. By implementing it, you can make the whole process easier for the customers than ever before. How and why?

A virtual banking assistant helps your employees solve queries more quickly. Voicebots and chatbots will answer questions like humans, with one simple difference – they will do it faster, as AI can process all your procedures and regulations in a matter of seconds. As a result, with the introduction of AI, the simplification of customer care has become of the utmost importance.

Improving Fraud Prevention Providing Swift 24/7 Support

Customers might have questions at any time, and when banking is considered, they want immediate answers. After all, their money is on the line. Introducing a virtual banking assistant in customer support is the answer to that desire.

AI-powered chatbots, being capable of solving less complex queries on their own, can be utilized to provide your customers with support 24/7. They do need a bit of human touch – someone who will kick in if the AI cannot handle the situation. But, by using AI assistants in customer support or GenAI bots, you can save money by having fewer agents working at night (and let’s be real, it usually means you have to pay them extra), and increase your customer satisfaction by providing your clients with quick responses even in the middle of the night.

KYC compliance is one of the most challenging tasks for banks, and fraud detection is a part of it. Every year, banks pay millions of dollars in AML fines for inadequate customer due diligence, insufficient internal controls, or failure to report suspicious transactions. Using eKYC or AI in customer support might help you avoid that.

To provide convenient and personalized experiences, a virtual assistant in banking usually analyzes the data and transitions of a given client. As a result, apart from directly helping the customer support team, it may be passively used for spotting potential fraud and preventing it. Due to the implementation of machine learning (ML), present in most virtual banking assistants, such an AI might learn from the data on previous cases of fraud detection, thus finding patterns that will help your bank spot issues that a human would be unable to.

Optimizing Costs in a Banking Service with an AI AssistCopilot

Another effect that AI baking assistants have on banking is that they let you utilize your resources more effectively. Instead of reading through numerous regulations and then coming up with a message, your employee might simply generate a response, verify it (our AI AssisyCopilot shows you what documents it’s based on), change the tone, and send it. As a result, answering a query takes seconds, not minutes.

This lets you achieve a major reduction in the operational costs of your bank as your need for basic customer support staff goes down significantly. Instead, you can focus on educating the most specialized, skilled ones who will be handling those queries that AI cannot.

Asynchronous Communication Thanks to AI Banking Assistants

Whilst using an AI prompter for banks still requires your employees to be present at the time the message was written, full AI-powered banking chatbots let you take the process to another level, by solving simple queries for you.

Why is this important? Because customers strive for immediate response, but having as many agents as possible tickets ready at the same time is impossible. With the use of bots, you may switch to asynchronous customer service – one where virtual banking assistants answer the queries, and your agents only overlook the process and add their own input where artificial intelligence is insufficient.

Supporting Support Agents with Virtual Banking Assistants

One of the newest innovations that impact customer care in banks is using AI-powered video assistants. These can serve as a major source of help for those agents who communicate with the clients through the video channel.

From making notes automatically to suggesting responses and documents that they are based on – virtual video assistants let banks transfer the best assets of voicebots and chatbots and translate them into the realm of video calls, effectively shortening them, thus enabling your employees to participate in more calls daily, and improving customer satisfaction by reducing the time they need to spend on contacting customer support.

AI Banking Assistant: Conclusion

AI virtual assistants, chatbots, and prompt generators have had a significant impact on banking, one that was and is still getting more visible. With the future development of more virtual assistants (yes, we’re working on one!) and the improvement in the effectiveness of AI in general, combined with the benefits that come from using AI-based technologies, we are likely to see an increase in the number of AI tools utilized in financial institutions soon! If you wish to learn more about AI in finances in general, we suggest reading our article on the role of AI in digital banking!

AI in Banking Customer Service: Trends and Innovations

What trends can we observe right now regarding the use of AI in digital banking and customer service of financial institutions? Take a look at the list below.

1. The Rise of Chatbots

Virtual assistants in banking are no longer a far future but rather a present, innovative approach. Due to the development of generative AI, chatbots are becoming increasingly popular in financial institutions.

The fact that major US banks, like Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, or Ally Bank, employ such tools speaks volumes – it’s a go-to solution for financial institutions with a plethora of benefits.

Yet, why is it going to be a major trend? Because before the rise of generative AI, chatbots were quite limited. Now, it’s different – with the new opportunities that come with generative artificial intelligence, AI-powered customer service in banking will become even more common.

Generative AI can be fed with information provided by a bank’s customer service team. As a result, it is capable of providing more accurate and precise answers to the questions asked by the clients – and do it in a much shorter time. This leads to better customer satisfaction and improved productivity, as skilled employees do not have to spend time searching through numerous materials to answer simple queries – when the topic is simple, the bot handles it, and the agent needs to engage only when the case is too complex for the chatbot. Therefore, we expect the trend to turn to virtual assistants to be present not only in 2024 but in the following years as well.

2. Self-Service Coming Live

With the rise of AI chatbots and eKYC solutions, digital banking strongly leans towards self-service – simplified yet effective and compliant verification methods and whole services available conveniently on mobile devices, with minimum need to visit physical branches. This trend is no mistake – it has its roots in the current market situation.

According to the Signicat Battle to Onboard report, just in 2022, about 68% of European consumers abandoned onboarding[1]. This is due to the fact that it’s a complex, time-consuming process. Yet, the fact that people are so willingly giving up on new banks poses a major challenge – the cost of customer acquisition rising.

To overcome these obstacles, banks need to utilize self-service while remembering to cater to the needs of the customer. This means preparing a self-service process that is as simple as possible while still having customer service agents ready to jump in and help when the customer feels lost. Only this can help reduce the onboarding abandonment rates – customers strive for freedom and simplicity but also easy access to support. Finding a balance between self-service and traditional onboarding is the key.

3. Personalizing Experiences

In the 21^st century, personalization has become of the utmost importance for most customer-based organizations, and banks are no exception. Since AI-powered customer service in banking enables a deeper level of customization, switching to it is yet another trend that we may observe.

With the use of AI in banking customer service, it is possible to provide clients with support most tailored to their needs. From automated product recommendations based on the data collection on a particular client to even the smallest elements that create a better experience and are often overlooked, like adjusting the tone of voice of the messages on the chat – artificial intelligence does the trick in and out.

To add to that, this personalization is often seamless. Changing the tone of voice in our digital customer service solution takes only a few clicks. Data analysis of the information on a given client is conducted in a matter of seconds due to the processing capabilities of artificial intelligence. The whole process is convenient and better than the traditional approach. Thus, the tendency to opt for such solutions shall grow in the future.

AI in Banking Customer Service: Conclusion

Artificial intelligence brings many advantages to the customer service in banking industry. Despite its limitations, AI is capable of improving customer experience, making the processes more convenient, and increasing the efficiency of the employees. It is a viable option right now, but just think about it – in a few years, when many of the limitations will be gone, AI will probably revolutionize customer support completely! 

Did you find this article interesting? Then we would like to recommend you our other post: Revolutionizing Customer Engagement: The Optichannel Approach in Banking

Sources:

[1] https://www.signicat.com/the-battle-to-onboard-2022

Embracing the Pulse of Innovation in the Banking Landscape

Returning from the dynamic setting of Money20/20 in Las Vegas, the LiveBank Team returns with a wealth of discoveries and insights that shed light on the evolving roadmap of banking. The conference proved to be more than just a gathering of minds; it served as an exploration into the intersection of technology with the core of banking.

At the heart of our discussions was the resonating theme of technology’s intersection with humanity in banking. The days spent at Money20/20 weren’t just about banking trends; they were about capturing the essence of where banking, driven by AI is headed in an increasingly digital world.

AI: Beyond Algorithms to Personal Touches

The resonance between technology and personalization, especially through the lens of AI, was a central focus. It’s not just about algorithms; it’s about understanding and anticipating the unique needs of every customer. The aim is to create a more personal and intuitive journey, transcending the mere digitization of processes.

Cloud Technology: Redefining Connections

The discussion centered around the transformative potential of cloud technology. The integration of cloud technology was not merely about data efficiency but a gateway to unlocking enriched customer relationships. The cloud isn’t just about storing information; it’s a platform for innovation, connecting customers in ways that were previously unimaginable. This innovative approach redefines how customers interact with banking services, fostering a level of connectivity that transcends traditional boundaries.

LiveBank team members, Mateusz Grys and Maciej Mazurkiewicz, were part of engaging panel discussions that explored the innovative use of AI in fraud prevention, anticipated future banking trends in the US & LATAM, and navigated the evolving landscape of customer-centric banking ecosystems. Additionally, Mateusz and Maciej shared insights and experiences in an interview with FinTech Futures. You can watch the interview below to delve deeper into their valuable contributions.

The overriding sentiment at Money2020 was one of invaluable learning and foresight. Our experience is a testament to the harmonious blend of technology and the heart in banking – where the power of innovation converges with the time-honored principles of trust, personalized service, and meaningful human connections.

As the curtains close on Money20/20, our vision for the future is crystal clear – it’s about crafting an empathetic future that seamlessly integrates technology and human values for the best customer experience. We look forward to continuing this journey, crafting the future of banking together. Stay tuned for more exciting updates on our blog as we navigate the ever-evolving landscape of banking innovation.

Reach out to contact@livebank24.com and dive deeper into the discussion or explore further collaboration opportunities.