One Zero Bank, Israel’s largest online bank, has rolled out a new external-facing artificial intelligence-powered tool that provides its banking customers with real-time assistance.
The launch has been hailed as bold and unique by industry insiders, since the bank goes where many other financial services firms across Europe and North America do not dare to go yet.
This prompted One Zero Bank CEO Gal Bar Dea to say he is “proud to lead the global charge from experimental Generative AI to its practical implementation.”
Real-time assistance
Developed and powered by the advanced AI tech startup AI21 Labs, One Zero Bank said its new GenAI service platfrom Ella2 should improve customer service significantly as it is able to provide real-time assistance, thereby cutting down wait times and offer a more tailored, personalised interaction with customers.
Bar Dea told QA Financial the feature’s “capabilities transcend linguistic barriers, ensuring immediate, accurate, and personalised responses while continuously evolving to meet individual customer needs.”
He added that the new service bot responds to common questions 24/7 and is able to offer personal account information upon request without the need to wait in line for service.
The service was piloted throughout June of last year and has now been fully integrated into the bank’s services platform, Bar Dea explained.
Zero Bank, Israel’s first digital bank and the country’s first new bank in over 40 years, was founded by Amnon Shashua, who later also co-founded AI21 Labs, an Israeli company that develops advanced AI technologies to solve complex problems and the firm behind the new feature.
“Our new AI assistant represents a shift in the digital banking industry towards a better customer experience that is faster, more reliable, and personalised to each user,” Bar Dea said.
Risks
Generative artificial intelligence is giving banks an unprecedented tech boost, driving them towards more efficient data-driven decision making and improving their customer service abilities.
But One Zero Bank goes where other banks do not dare to go. At least, not yet.
As reported by QA Financial yesterday, Citi’s head of analytics technology and innovation, Promiti Dutta, recently warned that all of the largest banks in the US – including Citi – still think it is too risky to launch an external, customer-facing, AI-powered bot.
Deploying generative AI externally, namely to directly communicate with customers via a support chatbot, the industry is not ready, she said at the recent VB AI Impact Tour tech conference.
“Things can go wrong very quickly, there’s a still a lot to be learned.”
–Promiti Dutta
There has been a lot of controversy recently about how LLMs ‘hallucinate’, or in other words, make up stuff.
This can “problematic” for banks and financial services where precision and accurateness are paramount. “There is no room for creativity,” New York City-based Dutta said.
“In an industry where every single customer interaction really matters, and everything we do has to build trust with customers, we can’t afford anything going wrong with any interaction,” she warned.
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