Intelligence assistance for banking customers is moving into the realm of the conversational.

As the excitement around chatbots continues to mount, companies are exploring how bots can best be deployed to provide customer value. In recent weeks, two companies have released first generation conversational bots aimed at assisting bank account and credit card holders.

Kasisto’s MyKai Bot Provides Conversational Access to Banking Info
Kasisto is a technology company that has been developing intelligent assistant solutions for the financial sector. A recent article in the Verge described Kasisto’s newly released banking bot. Kai, as the bot is called, is designed to make it easy for banking customers to manage their accounts without having to log into a banking website or start up a mobile app.

Kasisto is offering the Kai bot independently of banking institutions. That means that if you want to use Kai, you sign up through Kasisto, not through your bank. Once you sign up, Kasisto provides the information required for you to connect with Kai via SMS, Facebook Messenger, or Slack.

At this point, Kai acts more as an account advisor than as a banking teller. Kai is designed to understand different types of purchases. For example, you can ask the bot how much you spent on food during the previous month or what you spent at a specific merchant within a given timeframe.

Kai doesn’t support transferring money between bank accounts or making payments from accounts. In order to perform those actions, the bot would first need to be integrated into your bank’s transactional systems. If banks see value in account advisor bots such as Kai, that integration may be coming.

Kai does, however, support payments made through Venmo, the free digital wallet service offered by PayPal.

American Express Experiments with Facebook Messenger Bot
American Express also recently announced plans to deploy a chatbot on Facebook Messenger. Like the Kasisto bot, the Amex Bot is about making it easier for cardholders to access information from their account. The bot also offers opt-in notifications that send the user information about balances, benefits, and services related to recent purchases.

As with Kasisto’s Kai bot, the Amex bot allows cardholders to see how much money they’ve spent on certain items or within specific categories. According to a Business Insider article, the demoed Amex bot showed a user how much they’d spent on airline tickets and then offered information on Amex’s concierge service in the user’s destination cities.

Based on this description, it sounds like Amex is trying to create a bot that not only provides easy access to account information, but that becomes a helpful advisor offering tips on additional services or benefits that might be of interest to the cardholder. Insights into the cardholder’s recent purchases gives the Amex bot a leg up in terms of understanding what other services the user might need.

Privacy Concerns Linger
In order to use Kasisto’s Kai bot, you need to provide your banking username and password so that the bot can access your account. According to the MyKai FAQs, this data is encoded when sent across to your banking institution and it is not stored by Kasisto.

To use the Amex bot, the cardholder will presumably need to enter the username and password they created for the Amex website or mobile app.

As sensitive as we all are to the risks of giving out our banking credentials, people may be leary about providing their banking login information to a bot. It will be interesting to see if this concern creates a roadblock to the adoption of this first generation of banking bots.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles

Tags: intelligent Assistants, Kasisto, Bots, American Express