NAB wants more customers onboard with AI

NAB’s retail banking executive says there is still work to do to convince customers of the merits of incorporating more AI into processes and operations, despite positive experiences with the technology so far.

Ana Marinkovic from NAB (right) speaks at AWS financial services symposium.

Speaking at the AWS financial services symposium in Sydney, personal bank group executive Ana Marinkovic said that while the bank “talks a lot about the benefits of AI” and positions it as “a pathway for the future, a lot of our consumers do not necessarily have the same positive view on AI.”

In particular, Marinkovic said that customers’ concerns with the technology stretched from its role in scam and fraud enablement, to data privacy around how their personal information might be ingested or used by AI.

“It's really important for large institutions to continue to really educate both their employees as well as their customers around the benefits of AI, and the fact that humans without AI will be replaced with humans with AI,” she said, referencing an adoption trend promoted by Harvard and other commentators.

“However, at the core of it all, we will remain a humanistic, relationship-led bank, and that is going to continue [even with AI adoption and use].”

From a service perspective, Marinkovic said that customers “get a better experience” with AI involved in the backend.

“The phone call gets answered much quicker and they get their issue resolved faster than they [would] have previously,” she said.

“Customer experience is significantly augmented for the better.”

Banker experience is also greatly improved with AI augmentation, she argued, which had a flow-on impact for customer service.

Marinkovic said she had recently observed a demonstration internally where the preparation of a mortgage file was reduced from 48 minutes to three minutes.

“That is an extra 40 minutes that they [bankers] can go and actually continue that conversation with the customer, uncover more needs and talk to other customers, frankly,” she said.

Some of the ways that NAB personal banking customers come into contact with AI is when they seek to interact with the bank.

NAB previously re-platformed its contact centre operations onto Amazon Connect, and it continues to harness the capabilities of that platform to manage about 12 million calls a year.

It uses the platform to predict what a customer is calling about and to route it to the right “first point of contact” internally.

“That is saving significant time for customers, and it's also delivering efficiency and productivity benefits for the bank as well,” she said.

It uses a feature called ‘contact lens’ to perform conversational analytics on calls to ensure they meet quality standards.

The bank said it had also found that AI agents “tend to be faster and more accurate than human agents” when it comes to responding to simple types of queries submitted via chat.

“For simpler queries, our ability to resolve customers’ needs on the spot is increasing exponentially all the time,” Marinkovic said.

“I think we receive about 3 million chat requests a year and that number is increasing. It is a channel that customers seem to be adopting very rapidly. 

“Our ability to respond to that [increasing volume] is very much dependent on the adoption of the technology that we have at hand.”

Ry Crozier attended the AWS financial services symposium as a guest of AWS.