How does AI Integration Improve the Efficiency of Banking Operations?

Whether checking an account balance, scheduling a payment, or disputing a charge, waiting too long frustrates customers. Delays may compel them to look for other options that can provide them with quick help. Even a Salesforce report provides insight into customer behavior and says that 83% of customers expect immediate assistance or interaction when they contact any business.

This growing customer demand for immediate and quick responses has pushed banks to include new support in their operations. AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants are smart and tireless digital helpers transforming how banks and financial institutions interact and handle their customers. These AI-based supports provide human agents speed, accuracy, and around-the-clock assistance. According to Juniper Research, chatbot interactions in banking will save over 7.3 billion dollars by 2025.

The Topmost Uses of AI-Driven Tools in the Banking Industry

AI is quietly yet powerfully reshaping the functioning of banks at every level. From the moment customers open their banking application to the processes that run behind the scenes and keep financial systems running, AI helps customers resolve their issues in seconds, flags suspicious activities, and provides personalized financial experiences.

Faster Customer Service with Chatbots and Virtual Assistants

We may all have encountered a situation, such as trying to connect with our bank’s customer support or waiting on hold for long hours to get our queries solved or to connect to a human agent. Whether you want to check your balance, pay your rent, or dispute a charge, all these tasks may seem small but urgent, and may frustrate you if help is unavailable.

Here, enter the unsung heroes of modern banking—AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants. Digital banking assistants are not just FAQ pages; they are responsive, available 24/7, and smart enough to provide up-to-date information.

What makes AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants so efficient?

Speed & Scale: A chatbot never goes on a break. It doesn’t get tiring or overwhelming to receive even 10,000 messages from people related to different problems. Juniper Research says banks that deploy chatbots can save up to 4 minutes on every customer interaction. It can save up to billions of dollars annually. The tool can answer all basic questions instantly; you don’t need to wait in line or on a call.

Available 24/7: AI assistants can help you at 2 PM or 2 AM. So customers can get help whenever they need it. Once, such a kind of around-the-clock service was a luxury, but thanks to AI-based tools, it’s the new normal.

Consistent assistance: Humans may feel irritated when receiving too many messages at a time. We can mistype, mishear, or even be annoyed. On the other hand, chatbots can deliver consistent service without making any mistakes and with the same level of politeness.

Major banks around the world are already using AI-powered tools and seeing the impact

◉ Bank of America has deployed Erica, its virtual financial assistant, which has served over 1.5 billion interactions since launch. Customers use this tool to track spending, schedule bill payments, and check transactions.

◉ Likewise, Wells Fargo also deployed an AI chatbot within Facebook Messenger. It lets customers know about their accounts without logging into their application.

◉ HSBC uses AI bots for customer service and to assist internal employee helpdesks, finally reducing support tickets.

◉ Morgan Stanley introduced an AI chatbot named The AI@Morgan Stanley Assistant to support its financial advisors by providing instant access to its knowledge base. Now, more than 98% of advisor’s teams use this AI chatbot as it enables them to respond to client inquiries more accurately.

AI-powered chatbots can act as on-demand assistants for bank employees. These virtual tools can assist customers in getting answers to their complex questions in seconds and retrieving information. These tools make scheduling appointments, quick transactions, and performing many other basic functions easy. These tools reduce queues and free up your staff to handle complex tasks, improving overall service efficiency.

Helps in Fraud Detection in Real Time

Whether you receive an unexpected transaction alert or a change in account balance that you don’t recognize, financial fraud can leave you with sleepless nights. In this digital age, transactions happen in seconds, and banks need to be more careful and faster in providing fraud protection to their customers.

Here, AI can change the game and help banks to stop it in real-time.

AI-based tools use machine learning and real-time data analysis. These systems process millions of transactions at lightning speed. They learn from past customers and transaction behaviors and, based on this, detect the subtle signs of trouble.

AI is doing wonders in detecting fraud. The numbers themselves tell the story.

◉ IBM report says that financial institutions that deployed AI for fraud detection have witnessed a 60% improvement.

◉ According to PWC, 31% of financial services firms already use AI-based tools to monitor financial fraud.

◉ Mastercard’s AI-driven Decision intelligence system has helped the company reduce fraud and maintain a smooth customer experience. It evaluates each transaction against 1.9 million rules in milliseconds.

For banks and financial institutions, AI-powered fraud detection provides better regulatory compliance and fewer losses. For customers, it brings peace of mind, as they know they will get notifications even if someone tries to access their accounts.

Personalized Customer Experiences

It may have happened to you or many of your friends when you opened your banking app. A message popped up saying your credit card balance is due in 3 days or 5 days. Do you want to set a reminder for this? It gives the feeling that their banks know their needs. That’s the power of AI working behind the scenes, making your life very easy.

Artificial Intelligence-Based Tools Make Banking Feel Personal

With AI tools like NVDesk, which is a powerful case management tool for banking and finance, it comes pre-integrated with contact centers. Using this too, banks can provide tailored services that fit your needs. It provides automated ticket creation, unified case management, reporting and analytics, and recording of inbound interactions.

These AI systems analyze customers’ spending patterns, bank app or website interactions, and transaction history. Based on this analysis, they can provide innovative saving suggestions, targeted product recommendations, budget nudges, and timely reminders.

These personalized recommendations transform an ordinary banking experience into a genuinely helpful one. The data also supports this statement.

◉ According to an Accenture study, 91% of customers are more likely to turn to brands that provide relevant offers, and banking is no exception.

◉ McKinsey reports that personalization in banking can help businesses earn a 10 to 15% increase in revenue.

◉ Salesforce reports that 66% of customers expect businesses to understand their unique expectations and needs instead of offering generic support.

Real-world scenarios with real results, such as how big banks implement AI.

◉ Citi deployed AI to provide users with personalized financial insights about health and spending summaries.

◉ Chase uses AI-driven budgeting tools to highlight customer’s unusual spending and categorize the transactions.

◉ Revolut and Monzo are leading the way in personal finance with real-time spending alerts, custom goals, and real-time analytics based on user behavior.

Smarter Loan Approval

Earlier, getting loan approvals was a headache for customers. It involved a lot of paperwork and waiting for days or sometimes even months to get the amount. Whether it was a car loan, a home loan, or even a personal loan, the process was slow, stressful, and uncertain.

Loan officers assess borrower’s creditworthiness by manually reviewing stacks of documents such as bank statements, job history, credit scores, tax returns, and more. AI-powered systems have changed the entire scenario. These tools can do what humans simply can’t at scale, and analyze massive amounts of financial data in seconds.

Financial data is pulled from various sources, such as transaction history, spending and saving behavior, credit scores, employment status, etc. This precision and speed have allowed many banking institutions to improve their processes.

For example:
◉ Upstart’s AI-driven lending platform has automated more than 80% of its loans without human intervention.
◉ Zest AI has shown that AI-powered tools can reduce defaults by 30% and increase loan approvals by 25%.

The role of AI goes much beyond what has been written above. It helps to bring more people into the financial system as it can recognize reliable behavior through alternative data. For example, people who always pay rent and bills on time and do not use credit cards may be flagged as high risk through traditional models, but AI can track such people’s reliable behavior and give them loan approval.

Make Internal Operations Streamlined

AI-based tools work quietly in the background, making the entire banking machine run faster and smarter. Robotic process automation is designed to relieve agents of their workload and act as a super-reliable coworker who never makes typos or gets tired. It doesn’t feel irritating even if it has to perform the same task 1,000 times daily.

It can automate routine, rule-based tasks such as copying and pasting data across systems, generating daily reports, reconciling transactions, etc. While doing such tasks, RPA bots don’t need to toggle between different systems or spend hours entering data into spreadsheets; they can do it in seconds without error and accurately.

Besides, we can’t forget compliance, which is a huge part of banking operations. AI helps automate compliance checks and flags suspicious activities so that records can be maintained properly.

Wrapping Up

From providing faster customer services through chatbots and virtual assistants to detecting fraud and suspicious activities and streamlining internal operations, AI is bringing massive changes in banking experiences for customers and employees. With AI-driven tools, streamlining banking operations and making faster decisions has become easy.

NovelVox provides different AI-based integrations for banking and financial services, such as CTI integration, which ensures the availability of vital information to agents to deliver contextual and personalized interactions. Likewise, the NovelVox agent accelerator provides a unified screen that allows agents to view all relevant information on a single screen. IVA/IVR and bot integration provide self-service options and automate routine workflows to reduce long call queues.