Thanks to the transformative benefits promised by generative artificial intelligence (AI), the banking and financial sectors are at a turning point. From redefining a bank’s competitive edge in customer relationships to streamlining core banking operations and strengthening cyber-resiliency, AI technologies can unlock numerous new capabilities.

Institutions are already seizing the opportunity. The 2024 Global Outlook for Banking and Financial Markets from the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBM IBV) revealed that 78% of the 600 executives surveyed tactically deploy generative AI for at least one use case.

A popular entry point is generative AI assistants, and for good reason. After the COVID-19 pandemic sent the adoption of virtual agent technology soaring, companies are now discovering how adding generative AI into the mix can pay dividends. Forward-thinking organizations can remove friction from customer self-service experiences across any device or channel, driving up employee productivity and enabling adoption at scale.

The IBM Partner Ecosystem is helping banking and financial institutions bring their generative AI dreams to life through IBM watsonx™ Assistant, a next-gen conversational AI solution. Click here to explore the use cases and benefits by industry.

Automating the customer service experience for maximum efficiency

Insurance can be complicated, and customers naturally want things to be as simple as possible when they interact with providers. Generali Poland, which offers comprehensive insurance services, recognized that its customer consultants were spending most of their time repeatedly fielding basic queries and managing straightforward claims and policy changes.

The insurer teamed up with IBM Business Partner® TUATARA to reimagine its customer service experience. In one month, Generali Poland rolled out Leon, a virtual assistant built with action.bot from TUATARA, based on IBM watsonx Assistant.

Leon now handles more than 97% of customer conversations without requiring redirection to human agents. As a result, Generali Poland is saving approximately 120 person-hours monthly and has shortened customer consultants’ working time by one hour per day. Within a month of going live, the company had registered 2.5 times more customer interactions with the chatbot than with previous human consultants.

Building on technology leadership

TUATARA also helped leading cooperative bank BS Brodnica continue to challenge the status quo in customer service. The organization, which was one of the first cooperative banks in Poland to offer digital banking services, looked to harness AI automation to give its customers access to instant, high-quality support.

As a result, Piotr was born. Also based on action.bot from TUATARA and IBM watsonx Assistant, Piotr is a virtual assistant that’s fully integrated with the bank’s knowledge base. In three months, Piotr hit the ground running, taking part in 1,000 conversations over two months. So far, the virtual assistant has achieved a 90% accuracy rate for satisfying support inquiries; a figure that’s expected to rise thanks to built-in learning capabilities.

As Grzegorz Głowacki, a Member of the Management Board for IT and Innovation at BS Brodnica, sums up: “Through our work with IBM and TUATARA, BS Brodnica is boosting customer satisfaction, sharpening its competitive advantage and strengthening its position as the most innovative cooperative bank in Poland.”

Connecting the dots

Enterprising fintech innovators are recognizing the potential for generative AI to create compelling new service offerings for their customers. One such case is Asteria, an IBM Business Partner based in Stockholm, Sweden. They teamed with IBM Client Engineering to build Asteria Smart Finance Advisor, a new virtual assistant based on IBM watsonx Assistant, IBM Watson® Discovery and IBM® watsonx.ai™ AI studio.

Asteria Smart Finance Advisor gives Asteria’s small and medium enterprise (SME) clients immediate insight into the financial health of their businesses. The virtual advisor can also answer financial questions and advise them on which products are most relevant to their specific business and financial situation.

In an inspiring example of an IBM Business Partner harnessing IBM technologies to deliver tangible benefits to its customers, Asteria discovered in a pilot that it could use IBM watsonx™ to reduce the time spent on a loan application advisory process by 33%.

This pilot was just the beginning. Asteria plans to help its SME clients improve profitability, increase financial stability, and enhance financial acumen through broader implementation of its virtual advisor.

Bringing customer data to life

Generative AI is also proving its value in understanding customer behavior. Artefact, an IBM Business Partner headquartered in Paris with 1,500 employees globally, used IBM watsonx.ai AI studio to help a large French bank gain insights into consumer habits.

A bank employee wanting to understand how a certain type of customer might respond to a proposed offer first creates a target persona, such as a 20-to-30-year-old female professional living in a large city. The Artefact solution uses the target persona to model a virtual “cluster” of customers, with each cluster representing 2 to 3 million real customers. The employee can then interact conversationally with customer avatars generated by IBM watsonx.ai AI studio, querying them about their personal preferences and consumption habits.

A small Artefact team used the IBM watsonx.ai AI studio to deploy the entire solution, from back-end to front-end, in just one month. Based on the success of this initial use case, Artefact is now working on a second generative AI project for the bank that will automatically generate targeted emails to customers.

Taking the next step

This 2024 IBM IBV CEO Study revealed that product and service innovation is CEOs’ top priority for the next 3 years, with generative AI opening the door to a new universe of opportunity.

Generative AI assistants are an ideal entry point for organizations in the financial and banking sectors looking to gain a foothold in this exciting new world. With help from the IBM Partner Ecosystem, these institutions can effortlessly build assistants that wow customers while boosting the bottom line.

If your organization is ready to explore the possibilities of IBM watsonx Assistant and related technologies, try watsonx Assistant for free or embed watsonx in your solutions.