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UBS is testing a cognitive agent on its back office employees

UBS is testing an intelligent virtual assistant on some of its back-office employees, with the hopes that it will eventually help customers navigating through the UBS website.

The bank wouldn’t say when Amelia, the virtual employee’s name, will be deployed to help customers. But UBS said it hopes the virtual employee will help customers retrieve lost account information when they can’t log in and set up bill payees. Meanwhile, a pilot with employees has so far yielded encouraging results.

“We did not share that they were interacting with a cognitive assistant,” said Tom DeCarlo, managing director and head of client services at UBS. “[Many] thought they were talking to agents on the floor.”

UBS began an initial U.S. pilot with a dozen client sales assistants in mid-January of this year, an exercise which wrapped up in March. The bank said it plans to get the application up and running for its client sales assistants around the world by 2018. An additional Amelia pilot with the bank’s internal tech desk is currently underway in the U.K. and another one is planned for Switzerland. UBS working with software company IPsoft, which developed Amelia to help finance companies more efficiently deliver service to clients.  For the UBS U.S. pilot, DeCarlo said Amelia worked with client sales assistants responsible for moving funds from deceased account holders to beneficiaries. Amelia helped UBS staff confirm information and fill out forms.

“The folks that take those calls within the service organization today have roughly 10 to 15 years of experience, at the desk or within operations as there are many different variables that could come into play when outlining the document requirements and signatures relative to deceased retirement distributions,” DeCarlo said.

The move is part of a larger push from UBS on automated service enhancements. For instance, last year, the bank announced a pilot program with Amazon Echo to let clients and non-clients of the bank get answers to financial and economic questions. And the bank has been using basic bots to handle simple back-office tasks for over a year.

While Amelia has voice capability, during the pilot, UBS employees communicated with Amelia through a chatbot interface. Compared to basic bots, Amelia has the capability to deal with unstructured data that requires thinking and organization, which could be a major advantage in helping the institution deal with complicated processes and documents. And Amelia’s ability to think on her feet lets her to pivot easily based on learned behavior. “There’s two types of learning, that which is observed from rules, and there is also event-based episodic learning — if you have episodic learning, agents can learn very adeptly,” said IPsoft CEO Chetan Dube in a recent interview with Tearsheet. UBS’ emphasis on virtual human assistance dovetails on efforts other major banks have been taking, including Bank of America’s virtual assistant Erica.

The bank said bringing Amelia on board won’t result in any job losses, as it sees people migrating to new roles as they work alongside the technology. And since Amelia is fluent in a dozen languages, the bank can easily deploy her to help employees and customers around the world. DeCarlo said those who fear getting stuck when Amelia can’t resolve an issue can take comfort in her ability to sense when to escalate matters to humans.

“She’ll ask additional probing questions until she gets to a point where her confidence level is less than 99.9 percent, and then she will conference in a supervisor or subject-matter expert.”

 

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Inside USAA Bank’s digital experience playbook

Banks have begun the long, slow journey towards true customer-centric banking. It’s not like they have much choice. With commercial brands upping the ante on customer-centric moves, customers have come to expect the same from their financial service provider.

And because over 75 percent of millennials are willing to switch banks if they find a better alternative, banks that want to retain millennial customers, let alone acquire new ones, need to move from an organization-centric model to a customer-centric one. Preferably yesterday. The writing has been on the wall for years. Back in 2012, McKinsey warned that the future belongs to banks that put customers center stage in their business model.

Part of the push towards consumer-centric banking came from the bottom up. As a 2011 PWC report notes, mobile technology and social media have had a major impact on customer expectations and word-of-mouth marketing in the finance industry.

At USAA Federal Savings Bank, which serves active military members, veterans and their families, the process was reversed. Instead of digital serving as the catalyst for consumer-centric banking, the bank’s member-centric banking charter – much like that of a credit union – drives the firm’s digital experience strategy.

So while USAA is keeping an eye on certain prevailing fintech trends, like payments innovation, personalization and the rise of human-centered design, its digital experience roadmap is focused on solving customers’ needs and helping them become financially secure.

“As we evolve our digital experiences for the future, we’ve begun considering the idea of a distributed model for the digital experience,” said Melissa Ehresman, USAA’s AVP of bank digital experiences. “It will be less about a website or a mobile app as a destination and more about being where our members are and integrating with the technology around them, such as IoT and virtual assistants.”

The bank debuted its mobile virtual assistant app in 2013, and released a version of its online site in September 2016. The virtual agent is currently targeting infrequent digital users that need assistance with self service and those seeking a live agent. So far, member response has been good, with 800,000 members per month engaging with the virtual assistant. It’s been good for the bank, too. 70 percent of the members that interact with the tool don’t need to escalate to a live representative.

“We recognize the member desire to interact in different modalities, including tap, text, and speech,” Ehresman explained, noting that USAA has big plans for the virtual assistant. New technologies should enable the virtual assistant to learn member sentiment, and the bank hopes to expand adoption into more complicated or stressful tasks, like filing for insurance.

For USAA, the perfect digital experience is a three-shrimp cocktail: anticipating member needs with data, being proactive in communications with members, and ensuring the entire experience is simple and intuitive. The communication segment is particularly challenging, since USAA’s members are service members stationed across the globe.

But it is this geographical difficulty that has encouraged the bank to be a digital pioneer. “Since the military community moves more often than the average consumer, USAA found a way to move with them,” says Ehresman. The bank’s mobile app and website were created to address its military members’ financial needs, regardless of where they’re located or what time it is. For instance, the digital virtual assistant connects members to live service representatives, reducing the traditional IVR system’s number of  misrouted calls.

All of these innovations are a result of the bank’s investment in stable and scalable back-end infrastructure. By reinforcing the bank’s infrastructure and modernizing its technology architecture, USAA has been able to develop and implement front-end user experiences more fluidly.

While its members may be constantly on the move, the goal of all of USAA’s digital innovation remains the same: take care of its members.