The injection of artificial intelligence into traditional banking paradigms has already dramatically reshaped banking operations. As financial institutions seek transformative strategies to optimize cost centers and propel business growth, AI must remain at the forefront of their business models.
Generative and conversational AI solutions are catalysts for bringing about holistic change in banking operations.
But before we explore how this is occurring, a note on definitions: our products and solutions operate within the conversational domain. Traditional conversational AI (intelligent digital assistants/chatbots) use pre-scripted replies; whereas a generative AI solution creates generated replies.
Beyond Cost Centers: Shifting Paradigms in AI Adoption
While AI in banking is largely understood as a cost saving measure, using it this way is a bit like playing defense with no offensive strategy.
Yes, there are certainly a lot of ways AI saves money and creates greater efficiency. But banks and credit unions can realize growth opportunities with generative and conversational AI solutions in a number of high-value areas, including:
- Customer Engagement: This is where AI solutions can build a deeper understanding of customer motivation and emotion, enabling customer care teams to provide empathetic and context-aware responses. A wholly cost-centric AI strategy may inadvertently sideline customer engagement, potentially leading to missed opportunities to build stronger relationships and brand loyalty, both of which contribute to greater share of wallet.
- Revenue Generation: When optimized, AI solutions can be used to improve time-to-value by accelerating the process for account opening. AI can even support new revenue streams, along with cross-selling and upselling strategies – contributing significantly to the institution’s overall financial health.
- Data-Driven Insights: A myopic focus on cost reduction might mean neglecting the rich insights AI can extract from data that go beyond savings to inform strategic decision-making, better targeting of product offers, and overall business growth.
Enabling Customer & Member Profitability
A holistic approach to using AI in the banking sector entails the strategic deployment of artificial intelligence across the entire business spectrum, addressing both cost and profit centers.
Here’s what that can look like for different departments:
Contact Center
Generative AI and conversational AI helps enhance customer interactions, increasing employee and customer satisfaction, which leads to higher customer acquisition and retention.
How? Generative AI uses natural language processing (NLP) capabilities to comprehend complex queries and generate accurate, human-like text with incredible speed.
Human team members can use the technology to get immediate answers that help guide customers to the right solutions that support your business growth. The ability to find accurate answers instantaneously drives down training costs and decreases the onboarding costs for new employees.
Digital Engagement
Additionally, customer-facing tools powered by conversational AI can generate the kind of personalized response and conversation that creates a positive impression of your financial institution, and builds that rarest and most desirable commodity in business: trust.
From that trust foundation, it’s a lot easier to build deep customer relationships that improve retention and generate referrals – two keys to profitable operations.
Tech and Operations
While automation and cost savings are the obvious benefits of bringing AI into tech and operations teams, generative AI also frees up these critical teams to do work only humans can do, including strategic decision-making, deep relationship-building, product expansion, and more.
Tools that leverage AI, such as predictive analytics and forecasting, can better anticipate capacity needs and organize staff to focus on the highest value areas across your organization.
Marketing
Armed with generative and conversational AI, marketing departments don’t have to be considered mere cost centers. An AI-driven marketing approach impacts campaign creation, behavior analysis, customer engagement, and team augmentation.
Marketing teams can design and deploy comprehensive, personalized customer experiences that lead to higher retention, foster cross-selling and upselling opportunities, and, ultimately, increase the value of each customer.
Kasisto Powers Growth across the Banking Ecosystem
Financial institutions can leverage generative and conversational AI solutions to optimize cost centers, propel business growth, and enhance profitability.
From building trust and customer retention in customer contact centers to aiding strategic decision-making among tech and operations teams, these solutions can be used holistically across the enterprise to elevate business operations and overall performance.
Kasisto’s solutions harness the full potential of conversational and generative AI for the modern, growth-focused financial institution.
Our conversational AI-powered intelligent digital assistants deliver accurate, humanized banking conversations, and our generative AI solution, KAI Answers, empowers your employees with critical insights that help them drive memorable consumer experiences.
Profitability Spotlight: Meriwest Credit Union
Meriwest Credit Union saw an opportunity to leverage AI to not only deliver cost-effective service, but to increase profitability across member engagements.
The financial institution partnered with Kasisto to make this a reality – ultimately driving 30% more profitability when it implemented an intelligent digital assistant named Scout that operated as a virtual banker.
Check out the case study to learn more.
