We used to consider AI (Artificial Intelligence) like a pipe dream, somewhere between Siri – our favorite smartphone assistant – and a powerful computer designed to fulfill all of our desires. However, nowadays AI is pretty much everywhere. And in the World Wide Web, it’s thousands of little Siris popping on our screens to provide help and assistance: chatbots.

The age of chatbots, a new customer experience

Chatbots help you buy a train ticket, a gift for your wife, and even provide you the piece of information you were looking for. You can find them on websites or on Messenger, chatting with you like a real assistant with one big difference: it responds to your request within a second. An improvement for customer services of all types, chatbots can provide the answer to your question 4 minutes faster than a human (Juniper Research study). Designed to be fun, polite and conversational, these virtual assistants are about to become a must-have for every successful service company. But can chatbots improve the banking customer experience ?

Chatbots: a banking revolution?

When it comes to managing finances, customers often experience the same perception: solving a problem or getting an answer is long, and complicated. But what if a small piece of code could help banks save money and make customers happier ? According to Gartner – leader in technology research – 85% of business associations with banks will be managed through FinTech chatbots by 2020. The bot topic has already been discussed last year in Luxembourg City, 10 FinTech start-ups were gathered by Silicon Luxembourg and Khube (KPMG’s Hub for entrepreneurs) to engage a talk about AI and how it can improve the banking industry. In less than 3 years, banks using chatbots could save $8 billion (€6.8 billion) with faster and more efficient interactions between bots and customers (with $0.70 saved by interaction), Juniper Research revealed. The level of success rate for banking chatbots is also expected to grow from 20% in 2017 to 93% in 2020.

Seducing the young generation with banking chatbots

In the digital world, where everything is faster and easier, the young generation is expecting websites to seduce them. Easily bored, they need fully efficient platforms, easy to read and easy to understand. In banking more than any other field, chatbots are needed. Banks providing well-designed chatbots will attract a new generation of customers. But in order to save money, and not increase costs, banks need to take a deeper look at their virtual assistants, create a bot available on every platform – web, messenger… – at every hour of the day, providing instant response and most of all: capable of giving a relevant answer to every request. In a world of constant evolution, no one can predict for sure what AI technology will become in 10 years. Chatbots must always be improved throughout the years, as vocal and facial recognition are more and more discussed, and progress is made every day.