Dive Brief:
- On the heels of enhanced digital adoption during the COVID-19 pandemic, Bank of America is working to expand AI-powered digital assistant Erica’s capabilities to include personalized banking, investing, credit and retirement-planning advice.
- “This idea of reaching out to you proactively and telling you what your financial state is, almost like an adviser in your pocket,” Hari Gopalkrishnan, Bank of America’s CIO of retail, preferred, small business and wealth technology, said last week at a virtual fintech conference held by Tearsheet.
- The bank is working to expand Erica’s capability to offer proactive insights based on its understanding of a client’s typical transaction patterns. It may alert a customer of spending anomalies and suggest solutions, including, for example, if spending on a particular category was unusually high, Gopalkrishnan said.
Dive Insight:
Erica, which was launched in 2018, garnered 1 billion client interactions and has helped 32 million users. Bank of America expects Erica, early next year, to connect clients to banking agents regarding new products and services, such as mortgages, credit cards and deposit accounts.
The pandemic saw a growing number of older customers use digital banking tools, including Erica, Gopalkrishnan said. The bank now wants to build on enhanced adoption by improving the flow of transactions, including the seamless handoff from Erica to human agents and vice versa.
“We realized, at some point, people go, ‘I'm done with that chat, I need to talk to a human,’” Gopalkrishnan said. “What if we could just introduce the human agent right along with a chatbot, pick up from where you left the chat … and then step back and let the chatbot take over again.”
The bank is using natural-language processing tools to help draw insights from transactions and conversations, he said.
The use of predictive insights also extends to cases where customers dial the call center. Based on what the bank knows about the customer, Erica is sometimes able to guess why a customer is calling and suggest actions to resolve problems that arise, the bank said.
“We can, [for example], detect with the [interactive voice response] predictively that you're calling about a declined card,” Gopalkrishnan said. “We can then say … ‘Can I send you back a deep link that takes you to the part of Erica to take care of it yourself?’”
The pairing of Erica with human assistance can also help smooth the account opening process for wealth management products, he said.
Bank of America isn’t alone among large financial institutions launching or upgrading digital banking assistants.
Wells Fargo announced in October that it would soon launch digital assistant Fargo, which is built on Dialogflow, Google Cloud's conversational AI platform. Wells Fargo’s digital platform leader, Michelle Moore, was previously head of digital banking at Bank of America and led the development of Erica.
In September, Truist launched Truist Assist, a digital assistant that taps natural-language processing and natural-language understanding to offer insights and advice.
Bank of America has invested more than $10 billion in technology annually in the past decade, with more than $3 billion of it allocated toward new technology development aimed at improving user experience and personalization for clients banking online or on their mobile devices, Aditya Bhasin, the bank’s chief technology and information officer, said this year.
Clarification: This story has been updated to reflect Bank of America’s $3 billion investment on personalization is part of a broader technology investment package.
