editions

Artificial intelligence-powered contact center technology can help financial firms build more personalized customer service experiences, at a lower cost, by answering questions or correctly routing callers.

One of Australia’s “Big Four” banks, National Australia Bank (NAB), just signed a multimillion-dollar deal with Amazon Web Services to increase its cloud-enabled efficiency and innovation.  

The bank has moved 70% of its applications to the cloud and used Amazon’s cost-optimization tool Graviton to slash its cloud costs by $1 million a month.

It is also expanding its artificial intelligence-powered contact center tech, Connect, to all its call centers. Connect helps customers make authenticated calls through NAB’s app and uses natural language processing to respond or connect callers to the right customer service reps based on their queries, which helps the bank operate its centers more efficiently, with tailored experiences. “We want to deliver more personalized experiences for customers, aligned to their preferences in how they want to interact with us,” an NAB exec said in a press release.

Improving customer service through automation and NLP is a focus for cloud giants and ScaleUps alike, including Insight Partners’ portfolio company Cognigy, which serves insurance firms. 

Wells Fargo is providing a platform for its customers to build their own ideal digital banking experiences and hopes to set itself apart from competitors through customization, forecasting, and self-service tools.

Wells Fargo just unveiled Vantage, its new digital banking platform for business clients of all sizes. The portal uses artificial intelligence to provide recommendations and specific tools to each client, based on a firm’s scale and a given user’s position within the company.

Vantage will drive “an increasingly insightful experience” the more it’s used and includes features like forecasting and the ability to complete complex transactions.

“Wells Fargo builds closer relationships with its customers because it takes each business’s unique factors into consideration,” Wells Fargo head of digital, Reetika Grewal, told Insights Distilled. “By allowing customers to create an experience that works for them, it allows them to focus on the pieces of the platform they need and not sift through pages and menus that have no relevance to their business.” 

Vantage replaces a previous portal that launched over two decades ago and has had more than $1 trillion in payments volume per month. It differentiates itself from competitors’ business banking tools by offering a one-stop shop for clients ranging from Series A startups to global institutions.  

The pandemic normalized digital customer onboarding, often through video. AI-powered tech can provide even more seamless experiences.

UBS is streamlining its customer onboarding through a new partnership with ID verification firm Regula.

UBS uses Regula’s technology to read, authenticate and verify data from a person’s biometric passport – with RFID checks run on a server-side. Combined with facial recognition for a “liveness check,” this combination of techniques “ensures not only that the document belongs to the real person but also prove the document – for example a biometric passport in the case of UBS – is genuine, and its data is not manipulated,” Regula chief technology officer, Ihar Kliashchou, told Insights Distilled.  

Because this process is fully automated, UBS can now offer customers a 24/7 onboarding process that requires very little effort on their part, and also allow them to create secure electronic signatures. UBS appeals to high-touch, wealthy clients, and it wants to make their initial experience with the bank as seamless as possible.  

Regula also counts The Commercial Bank of Dubai and Emirates NBD among its banking customers. Other know-your-customer verification providers catering to financial firms include Chekk, Veriff, and Insight Partners’ portfolio company Transmit Security, which serves Santander and HSBC.   

As the economic climate remains precarious, technology for optimizing client portfolios can provide advisors with an edge as they try to help their customers build wealth.

JPMorgan Private Bank just made a strategic investment in Swiss software firms Edgelab and Evooq – which specialize in risk analytics, portfolio construction, advisory platforms, and workflow – as it seeks to strengthen its digital investment capabilities for wealthy clients. 

JPMorgan has already been using the firms’ technology to deliver “personalized planning” to its clients and its investment comes at a key moment: As the market becomes particularly challenging to navigate, systems that can flag risks and opportunities that a human may otherwise miss are crucial.  

The Private Bank has been acquiring and investing in companies in recent years to anticipate “the technology needs of our clients 5-10 years down the road,” a spokesperson tells Insights Distilled, including buying OpenInvest and Global Shares, and investing in Kraft Analytics Group, and MioTech. “These companies will enable us to deliver the next generation of digital, personalized, and ESG solutions to our clients.” 

JPMorgan’s move also aligns with a larger industry trend towards a “true hybrid advice model” of wealth management, which combines algorithmically suggested portfolio changes with human advice.   

Digital avatars have the potential to make routine interactions more personable and impactful, whether in the metaverse or just as a substitute for big blocks of text.  

Deutsche Bank believes that digital avatars are a “natural evolution of the current self-service user experience” and it’s working with Nvidia to create them as part of a larger partnership to spread artificial intelligence throughout the bank.  

While realistic-looking avatars will eventually appear in the metaverse to make digital interactions feel more human, they’re more immediately useful for efficiency and accessibility purposes, like onboarding new employees without making them slog through pages and pages of text.  

DB will start by using its virtual avatar to respond to HR-related questions and help employees navigate internal systems. In this way, the bank “further improves our ability to respond to requests 24/7, enables our employees to find HR answers quicker, and reduces the number of repetitive tasks,” DB chief innovation officer Gil Perez told Insights Distilled. This allows “employees to focus on more value-added activities with increased work environment satisfaction,” he added.  

Digital avatars are much more “intuitive, warm, and personable than text,” and require less time, effort, and cost than producing traditional videos, according to Natalie Monbiot, head of strategy at AI-powered video firm Hour One, an Insight Partners’ portfolio company. They create “more of a two-way experience that users prefer,” she told Insights Distilled, citing an Hour One pilot for HR interviews. 

In addition to digital avatars, Deutsche Bank will also work with Nvidia on improving its risk management and high-performance computing, among other efforts. 

Financial advisors are looking for ways to use complex analytics and automation to more efficiently optimize their clients’ portfolios, especially as the economic climate pummels the market. 

BNY Mellon has invested in fixed income platform bondIT to help its financial advisors better manage client portfolios. The startup’s platform automizes portfolio research, construction, and management, using artificial intelligence to flag potential risks or investment opportunities ahead of the wider market.  

The partnership essentially expands BNY Mellon’s “portfolio optimization capabilities,” according to managing director John Goodheart, who is joining bondIT’s board.  

BNY Mellon began its relationship with bondIT in 2021, when the startup joined its accelerator program, highlighting how these hubs can become catalysts for deeper relationships and tailored innovation.  

As the economic outlook remains uncertain into 2023, financial advisors want access to technology that can give them an edge in helping their clients build wealth: JPMorgan made two similar investments earlier this month. 

As consumers flock to services that make instant peer-to-peer payments simple, financial firms can stand out by bringing that same ease and convenience to business customers. 

ABN Amro just launched a business version of its popular peer-to-peer payments app, Tikkie, which lets companies create and send payments requests to customers through text, WhatsApp, email, or QR code.  

The new payments app is convenient for both businesses and their clients, head of marketing Moreno Kensmill told Insights Distilled: Companies get paid quickly and easily, while customers can stick to an interface they’re familiar with, instead of filling out a traditional invoice.  

The app helps business customers get paid faster, Kensill added, with “a whopping 80%” of requests paid within 24 hours, “mainly due to the convenience factor.”  

The app already has 25,000+ business users and the max ceiling for single business payments is €50,000 (compared to €750 for consumers). That’s a much higher limit than banks in the US offer small businesses through instant payments service Zelle. 

Open source software is shaping innovation in financial services through its interoperability and increased security – and top firms can reap the benefits if they both adopt and contribute to projects. 

Financial organizations are increasingly adopting and contributing to open source software, according to a new survey from FINOS.  

Open source software can bring a variety of benefits to financial institutions, including increased engineering speed, improved code quality, better application interoperability, and greater safety. “The collaborative, transparent nature [of open source] makes it very innovative,” according to expert Tracy Miranda. For example, earlier this year Citi released an open source project focused on mitigating software supply chain attacks. Being involved in open source can also help FinServs attract top talent, since contributing to projects allows developers to see the industry-wide impact of their work, collaborate across companies, and earn cachet.  

Top firms like Citi, JPMorgan, UBS, RBC, and Capital One are all members of FINOS, and the survey found that 20 financial institutions rolled out Open Source Program Offices this year. 

It also tracked a 25% increase in contributions from financial services firms on GitHub this year, and found that 48% of respondents worked for firms that openly encouraged the use of open source software, up from 27% in 2020. 

Consumers crave cheaper, convenient international money transfer options, but there’s still no clear winner in the market. Card networks can ensure their piece of the pie by building relationships for cross-border payments. 

The problem of transparent, cheap, and fast international payments is being approached from many different angles – including through blockchain-based digital currencies – by fintechs and legacy institutions alike.  

Payment card networks stand to win a significant share of cross-border payment volume if they can establish themselves as a good partner for everyone. To that end, Mastercard and fintech Paysend just announced a partnership to offer money transfers across dozens of countries, as the startup competes with legacy remittance firms like Western Union and MoneyGram.  

For Mastercard, the partnership fits into its plan to widen its network overall: By helping both fintechs and traditional banks slash the cost and time required for international transfers, it continues to be a key payments rail for cross-border transfers.   

Payment card networks like Mastercard and Visa have “been trying to crack this opportunity for years, and while they’ve gained traction, they’re a long way from succeeding,” according to Celent analyst Gareth Lodge, because of all the fragmentation and varied options. Partnerships like this one show how Mastercard is focused on making sure its payment rail remains relevant. 

Collaboration is key to a safer financial system for all: Through data pooling and anonymous benchmarking, banks can better manage their operational risk and controls.

Big banks are embracing a platform that promotes industry-wide standards for operational risk management. JPMorgan, Citi, BNP Paribas, Barclays, and Lloyds Banking Group all just contributed to a $24 million investment in operational risk data network Acin. 

Financial institutions can digitize and ingest their operational risk data into Acin’s network, allowing them to compare it to that of their (anonymized) peers. Sharing data into a standardized, collaborative library ultimately helps them discover and prioritize changes they can make to become safer or more efficient. 

Traditionally, banks have hired consultants to achieve these results by digging through their documentation “to complete lengthy and costly benchmarking programs,” Acin’s chief revenue officer, Kieron Sambrook-Smith, told Insights Distilled. But the firm’s system automatically “turns documents into data” to analyze how an institution’s risk controls (around cybersecurity, anti-money laundering, or ESG regulations, for example) stack up, more easily and at a lower cost.  

The idea is that by effectively crowd-sourcing risk management controls data, banks can tap into the wisdom of the crowd to fill their own gaps and improve their systems. The strategy of aggregated, anonymized data for wider industry insights also has uses in fighting fraud as well as advertising.