“Alexa, How much money do I have?”

The practicality of AI for voice banking

In a recent article on ThePaymentsReview.com titled Trellance Predictions for 2018, Artificial Intelligence (AI) was touted as having “become a must-have in the everchanging market. Credit unions need to make AI a part of their strategy to continue competing in the payments and lending space.”

The prediction made at the beginning of the year was that “We will see an increase of AI technology in consumer lending, customer (member) interaction/retention, payments and fraud detection.” Following up on the topic of “AI” with the intent of offering additional insight and feedback as the market continues to evolve, and more importantly what our member credit unions are planning or implementing, we found that the interesting part of AI is that it is not focused on one area but offers a variety of solutions for data analytics, voice banking and many others. The continued rise in Fintech providers has made the industry become more competitive, as there are so many options.

While a lot of information on AI seems to focus on ways to manage data, an area that has become extremely popular in a short span of time, all while seeing tremendous growth, is Voice Banking using Smart Speakers. Just under 3 years ago, a new generation of the smart speaker was born through Amazon Echo. Not only is the device connected 24/7, but it allows consumers the ability to access their account and make changes without having the device in their hand and even from across the room using voice recognition. This is a great technological advantage for our fast pace lifestyles. With the introduction of voice banking, consumers can add their banking needs into a day spent multi-tasking. For example, the consumer is busy preparing dinner and at the same time completes an account transfer or checks the status of an account. While never taking their eyes off the current task at hand. This advantage will continue to make banking interactions more and more convenient for a consumer.

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