Your concierge for financial services

With advances in technology, chatbots can help you transact and seek information much faster than traditional channels

You want to renew a fixed deposit that is about to mature in a few days. The quickest way would be to dial the call centre, go through the interactive voice response (IVR), wait for an executive, verify credentials and then give a request. What if you could simply open your bank app and write "renew my fixed deposit" and it’s done? Increasingly, banks and other companies in the financial sector are resorting to chatbots to give customers such hassle-free experience.

“Companies are automating most common services and queries for which customers approach them or dial their call centres. While it saves manpower and cost for corporates, for customers it adds convenience and saves time,” says Beerud Sheth, co-founder and chief executive officer of Gupshup — a bot and messaging platform. You can see more banks, insurers and even stock brokers integrating chatbots in their social media platform, apps and website.

You can use chatbots to get basic information such as interest rates, IFSC code, track application status, block card, set alerts, get an account statement or a copy of insurance policy on email and so on. Many are also introducing platforms where a customer can do transactions such as bill payment, mobile recharge, open and renew fixed deposit transfer money, and so on. With a stock broker offering chatbots, you can even ask to automate purchases of stocks at a desired price. To avoid verification for every transaction, your mobile or social media account can be registered with the company, using a one-time password (OTP).

These software programmes use a host of technology to understand the customers’ chats. “Different individuals ask the same question in a variety of ways. Chatbots use natural language processing to interpret what the individual is saying. These also use artificial intelligence to retain the context of the chat, which helps it avoid asking the same question again and again,” says Nitin Babel, co-founder of Niki.ai — a company that provides a chatbot platform.

Customers, too, seem to slowly prefer bots over calling up companies. HDFC Bank’s chatbot, Eva, developed by Bengaluru-based Senseforth AI Research, has interacted with over 530,000 unique users, holding 1.2 million conversations and addressing 2.7 million queries in the past six months.
 

The benefits of chatbots for individuals are many. Explains Amit Sethi, CIO at Axis Bank: The quality of service is either the same or better as chatbots improve. These can also use multiple sources of information to present the most suitable answer to you instantly a human cannot. “The most important factor is the ease of use. It’s like chatting with someone on a messenger,” says Sethi.

The functionalities of a chatbot are not limited. “They also learn and grow more intelligent,” says B Madhivanan, chief technology and digital officer at ICICI Bank. Madhivanan explains: When the chatbot is unable to answer customer queries, the query is automatically transferred to an executive. As the executive resolves the query, the chatbot at ICICI Bank learns and builds a scenario for similar future questions. “Going forward, the platform has the capability even to do credit modelling and underwriting,” says Madhivanan. Banks, today, don’t look at small-ticket loans of Rs 10,000 and Rs 20,000, as they spend a lot of money to evaluate the applicant. An automated process can bring down cost and let customers take even small-ticket loans instantly from lenders.