Burgan Bank launches electronic virtual assistant – Banki

By Edil Corneille

Kuwait City-based Burgan Bank launched BANKI, a voice-enabled artificial intelligence-powered banking chatbot. The solution uses AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP), to better understand customer inquiries and enable relevant and contextual responses from innumerable sources accordingly.

Masoud Hayat, Burgan Bank Vice-Chairman and Group CEO enunciated, “Burgan Bank adopts modern and pioneering services and technologies in line with current market trends which are leading to a shift in the way banks work and perform.

“With evolving customer expectations, we believe that AI is the key to creating personalized and better customer experiences across the digital channels. The Bank is investing in conversational AI as part of its strategy to empower customers and provide them with deeper insights into making better financial decisions as they make everyday purchases or prepare for life’s biggest moments.”

Burgan Bank’s customers can now receive information related to products and services instantaneously by conversing with BANKI in both voice as well as text available in Arabic and English languages instead of searching, browsing, clicking buttons or waiting on a call. Moreover, BANKI is available round the clock to assist customers with their banking needs.

Burgan Bank’s Group Chief Operations and Technology Officer, Venkat Menon elucidated, “We are laying a very solid foundation for the transition to the next phase of artificial intelligence-based voice and chat enabled ‘conversational banking’. Our goal is to ensure the entire service experience is seamless and more personalized with instant responses so that the chatbot can evolve and act as a banking assistant in the future.”

Financial institutions globally are adopting chatbots which could help save costs arising from the deployment of call centres. Customers can get their queries addressed by chatting with the technology, instead of visiting bank branches personally. Services and products offered can be apprised via the chatbot, thereby resulting in saving of time and availing of answers from a single source.