Chatbots are no longer the once annoying systems that offer the same predefined answers, leaving you with the sentiment of a one-dimensional conversation.

Redefined by Artificial Intelligence (AI), they go far beyond bots and act like smart digital assistants that engage and delight customers with a touch of a human-like interaction combined with a personalized experience and a sense of realness. Fintech News

According to a survey conducted by Oracle recently, the company found that by 2020, 80% of companies will be leveraging chatbots. But, the future of chatbots for financial services is still hazy.

Banks and fintech have already introduced chatbots in different business line support systems. Presently, you can consider Erica, the virtual assistant of the Bank of America and BMO Bolt from Bank of Montreal as perfect banking chatbot examples that depict the future of banking.

In the previous few years, the financial services industry has witnessed extreme changes and competition. The sector already has lots of things to manage and regulate and emerging competition, rising customer expectations, and regulation just pushed the industry to think back to their IT and come with game-changing innovation.

In addition, FinTech start-ups across the world are booming like mushrooms. These start-ups are invading established markets. They have started to lead with customer-friendly solutions created from the ground up and don’t have a burden of legacy systems.

Technology offers solutions, permitting financial institutions to reduce costs and become more efficient at what they do. There are several financial services technologies persistently evolving, and a lot still needs improvement to accomplish the desired outcome. 

As per The Financial Brand, by 2030, AI can save the banking industry over $1 trillion. And here the rise of chatbots is playing a key role.

However, a chatbot is not only about being pocket-friendly. It is an effective technology solution that financial service providers utilize to offer exceptional customer journeys with the help of quick responses, 24/7 availability, personalized service, meeting customer goals and improving their financial well-being.

We are witnessing an exploding number of chatbots worldwide. In a crowded chatbot space, it is vital to select a bot solution that brings together the best out of the Human and AI universes.

Are Chatbots Functional?

Have you ever noticed, on some websites, as soon as the site is loaded, a small pop-up window appears on the screen and greets you with the asking, “How can I help?”

Such a method of greeting visitors on websites is becoming highly common. Businesses these days presume every visitor a first-time visitor, and it could be their first interaction with the company. Therefore, they are utilizing this pop-up window to perceive their customer service. But the warm welcome a visitor receive is hardly served by an individual. Your conversation at that pop-up window could possibly be with a chatbot.

A Growing Market

1. 67% of industry experts believe that chatbots will outperform mobile applications in the period of next five years
2. Predictions that chatbots will save $8 billion of businesses per year by 2022
3. By 2022, we will be talking to chatbots more often than we talk to our friends.

What Is a Chatbot?

Chatbots are framing conversational experiences utilizing AI and natural language processing (NLP). Artificial intelligence and natural language processing engines allow a chatbot to mimic conversations with real human beings. Today, a chatbot can mimic conversation in both written and voice formats.

Chatbots technologies have developed to the extent that they can recognize and understand the underlying intent of a human phrase.

The more a chatbot interacts with humans, the more its software learn from conversations and produce improved responses over time. Experiences chatbots are currently capable to provide range from functional to fun.

Types of Chatbots?

With the help of custom bot’s development services, conversational experiences can be designed for AI-powered chatbot to achieve various kinds of jobs. Chatbots for financial services and banking solutions hold tremendous scope and addresses several business use-cases. Hence, strategic investment in a virtual agent could demonstrate for an organization a highly advantageous business move. Here are top areas where the application of AI in finance will help receive higher ROI.

1. Informational 

Although informational chatbots are considered the simplest type and normally designed to provide general information like news stories, FAQs, and push notifications. It is changing habits in how we store and access information related to finance. A visitor can ask questions that range from the latest account balances, when certain bills are due, the status of accounts and more.

1. Transnational

Closing transactions and paying bills through a chatbot is entirely different from asking general questions. But AI and allied technologies utilized in Chatbot has developed and facilitated transactions of money for products or services in the chatbot window.

A user doesn’t have to worry about security concerns as the chatbot first authenticates the user account through OTP or other convenient yet secure ways. Chatbots for financial services could help users have a hassle-free transnational experience that ranges from paying for booking a hotel, help to block cards, transferring money between accounts, and more. Chatbots can be designed to help clients with everyday requirements.

1. Advisory

Self-learning conversational UX is the next evolution in chatbots. These chatbots are designed to learn from computer interactions. Hence, it will be able to decide the appropriate next steps. These types of chatbots for financial services have a huge scope in advisory requirements.

Individuals have been hesitant to talk about their financial conditions and investment requirements with experts. On the other hand, so much time of agents spent on answering the questions of the clients through call or email like what is your hourly rate? What number of people can we have under one profile? Real-time chatbots are a go-to solution for these difficulties.

Building a Better Chatbot

The future of chatbots for financial services is friendly. It’s also kind, compassionate, and slightly humorous. In short, it’s the integration of emotional intelligence as an ally to existing dispassionate data discussion.

This is the cutting edge of AI, developing natural-language tools capable of filling dead air in conversation, with supportive “uh-huh” or “mmm-hmms” and recognizing the telltale signs of anger or frustration in human voices, permitting chatbots to bring in human agents when conversations go beyond their depth.

Similar to Big Data analytics or cloud computing deployments, developing emotionally associated, secure chatbots capable of carrying on significant financial conversations isn’t something banks should handle on their own. Here, it’s critical to discover industry front-runners capable of taking the lead on Artificial Intelligence development and helping bots become more than the sum of their parts.

Advantages of Having Chatbots for Financial Services?

Chatbots are data-driven, scalable, and empower a richer customer experience. A well-structured chatbot can work the same way not in finance, but in banking, hospitality, retail, and many other sectors. Since chatbots are designed to offer a personalized experience to clients, here are the benefits finance businesses could experience from Chatbots.

• User Engagement

Customers are asking for instant communication. Emails and phone calls have become things of the past after the presence of social media and messaging applications. Chatbots bridges this communication gap fantastically between organizations and customers.

It is tool clients embracing the day in and out. Chatbots can really develop customer satisfaction for financial organizations and professionals, rather than replacing them. For example, take, Bank of America rolled out “Erica” a chatbot and has seen impeccable results.

• 24/7 and Scalable

Conversational specialists stay on computing systems, thus allowing an organization to provide service to its visitors throughout the day. Evolving technologies also permit them to be like a trusted, always accessible and accurate partner. Once an organization builds and utilizes conversational experience, it helps them serve users 24/7.

• Intelligence Advantage

Natural language processing is developing every passing day, so does chatbots. These small behind the screen technology is presently capable of understanding how customer speaks and respond accordingly. Incorporating intelligence in an experienced chatbot is designed for creates a more robust business model that could be difficult for competitors to replicate.

Making compliance easy

Beyond the transactional domain of compliance as in the case of KYC, chatbots can also help in making compliance with complex requirements 2X faster and effortless. For example, in the United Kingdom, the new GDPR regulation entails recording & reporting of specific time and date of getting consent from the individual for the processing of her/his personal information.

Consider this. Rather than asking an employee to check multiple systems/databases on when the bank received the email communication from the individual client giving the consent, you can essentially ask this question to a chatbot, that is trained on this data and querying.

Chatbot technology complemented by distributed computing empowers the staff of banks to meet more complex compliance requirements much faster and reduce the cost of compliance.

So, At Last

The chatbot phenomenon will cause broad disruption in numerous areas of finance and the economy of the world. But here it is essential to take note that in spite of their popularity, it isn’t as simple as it seems to create a truly valuable chatbot. A chatbot should be designed and developed to create an experience that provides value both to the customer and business.