NEW YORK, June 28, 2016 — Kasisto, an AI company launched out of SRI International and backed by the world’s most innovative banks, today announced KAI Banking, a conversational AI platform that powers smart bots for next-generation banking experiences. Now for the first time consumers can manage their money across accounts, track expenses and send money to friends without leaving their favorite messaging app.
Kasisto released two KAI Banking products today – one for banks and one for consumers – both with deep financial knowledge and data gleaned from millions of banking interactions collected, analyzed and processed.
KAI Banking on Messaging
KAI Banking on Messaging brings intuitive, conversational banking to the hundreds of millions of people on Facebook Messenger, Slack, SMS and other messaging services. It enables banks to power smart bots so that customers can bank conversationally from their preferred messaging app. Bank-branded smart bots can fulfill banking queries, transact, predict needs, and guide people through banking experiences in a completely new way. It is built on the same conversational AI engine already powering virtual assistants in mobile apps, and is now extended to messaging platforms.
Royal Bank of Canada, a global leader in the development and implementation of innovative mobile technology, will be the first North American bank to use KAI Banking on Messaging. DBS Bank, the largest and most innovative bank in Southeast Asia, will also be rolling KAI-powered smart bots out to its customers.
“At RBC, we’re focused on being anywhere and everywhere that our clients expect us to be. By leveraging Kasisto’s Conversational AI, together with our patented RBC Secure Cloud, we could engage with our clients on their preferred messaging apps with a banking experience that is as natural as texting a friend, while delivering the security our clients expect,” said Linda Mantia, executive vice president at Royal Bank of Canada. “We will have a pilot underway to deploy KAI-powered smart bot and see this innovative banking experience as a way for our clients to interact with RBC in an entirely new way.”
Said Piyush Gupta, DBS Bank CEO, “At DBS, we seek to seamlessly integrate banking into customers’ everyday lives, making banking simpler and more convenient for them. Today, KAI, an artificial intelligence-powered virtual assistant already powers DBS digibank, India’s first mobile-only bank. To make banking even more effortless, we aim to introduce banking via messaging in Singapore and India by year-end because many of our customers are already spending significant time in their chat apps.”
MyKAI
Any consumer with a U.S. bank account can start using a subset of KAI Banking features today, independent from their bank. Called MyKAI, it is a personal banking bot that provides a secure way to manage money, track expenses, analyze spending, answer banking questions and make payments via Venmo from inside Facebook Messenger, Slack and SMS. With 20,000 US financial institutions supported, anyone can have instantaneous and easy access to all of their checking, savings, credit cards and other accounts. MyKAI is fluent in banking and understands transactions and accounts, from histories to categories to dates and merchants. It can tell you things like how much you spent on Uber last month, what your largest transaction was last week, and lets you make payments to friends. KAI is as secure as a mobile banking app and natural as texting a friend. It is available today at www.kasisto.com/mykai.
The KAI Banking conversational AI platform has an easy-to-integrate, comprehensive API, and modern SDKs so that banks can get to market within weeks. From a single backend, KAI Banking powers virtual assistants and smart bots to reach customers on mobile, messaging and wearables. Self-serve tools let banks customize deeply, measure performance and increase engagement in real-time.
“The face of retail banking is changing, driven partially by startups but also from the inside of some of the most forward-thinking banks globally,” said Kasisto CEO Zor Gorelov. “We are using conversational AI and deep financial knowledge so that banks can leverage the popularity of messaging services to promote features and services to existing customers and attract new customers with delightful, intelligent conversation.”
About Kasisto
Kasisto was founded in 2013 with the vision of enabling companies to engage and transact with their customers through intelligent conversations, anytime, anywhere. Kasisto’s conversational AI platform, KAI, offers enterprises a comprehensive AI technology stack combined with industry-specific domain expertise to make bots and virtual assistants well versed in the businesses they serve. As an SRI International spin-off, Kasisto leverages decades of research and development in artificial intelligence. KAI Banking enables financial institutions to add virtual assistants and smart bots to their mobile apps and leading messaging platforms. With an emphasis on great user experience, KAI-powered virtual assistants and smart bots are easy to implement, customize and maintain. For more information visit www.kasisto.com and follow @kasistoinc on Twitter.
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