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Silicon Valley Bank exec says the “the mass digitalization of customer service” is still an unsolved problem

Conversational AI and digital customer service can boost customer acquisition and satisfaction while reducing costs, but lack of sophistication or siloed data can make comprehensive deployment a challenge.  

“There are all kinds of communication tools – chatbots and that type of thing – that help you do more at scale, but not do it really well,” Silicon Valley Bank’s Dan Allred said on stage at the Fintech Nexus conference in New York City, referring to digital customer service tech as “a nut that is not going to crack yet.”  

Indeed, chatbots are often fragmented across lines of business or limited in their scope.  

For example, Westpac, a $965 billion-asset bank in Australia, is working with Kasisto to co-develop an orchestration layer  – a “master bot,” if you will – to pull information from all its existing chatbots. There are a slew of other firms working on conversational AI and digital customer service for financial services, including Clinc and Glia, both of which are Insight portfolio companies.