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YES BANK Partners Microsoft To Strengthen Its AI-Powered Chatbot

YES BANK

YES BANK has partnered with Microsoft to strengthen its first of its kind, Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled chatbot, YES ROBOT. It is equipped with advanced NLP engine LUIS (Language Understanding Intelligent Service) and other cognitive services, capable of understanding and resolving the evolving banking needs of customers without the need for human intervention.

Built on Microsoft’s modular and customizable AI platform, the all new, reinvigorated YES ROBOT enables users to perform financial and non-financial banking transactions by employing conversational AI equipped with extensive financial knowledge, thereby relieving customers from the hassle of navigating through multiple web pages.

Commenting on the partnership, Ritesh Pai, Chief Digital Officer, YES BANK, said, “YES BANK has been one of the early adopters when it comes to leveraging machine learning and AI. Recognizing that chatbots would be game changers in the industry, providing major competitive advantage to banks, we had started working on automating several processes and service touch points through Bots as early as 2016. The reinvigoration of YES ROBOT in-house, using Microsoft’s cognitive services aims to further enhance customer service by personalizing interactions and reducing the time-of-first-response to just a few seconds”.

“The aim is to make the whole service experience more personalized and instant, so that the chatbot can evolve and operate as a full-fledged banking assistant in future,” adds Ritesh.

Meetul Patel, COO, Microsoft India, said, “YES BANK is taking a big step towards its vision of creating a bank of the future. This innovative solution leverages the latest technologies to help customers interact with the bank in new, more efficient, and scalable ways. Our teams have partnered to integrate Microsoft’s Azure Cognitive Services with existing systems to deliver this intelligent chatbot. It is one of YES BANK’s many innovations, and we are extremely proud to be a part of its journey to bring the best of technology to its customers.”

A customer can apply for over 65 banking products, check his/her eligibility for a loan and then get serviced by a Relationship Manager after all the basic checks are done by the Bot. YES ROBOT can provide an indicative loan amount using Machine Learning (ML) and advanced credit scoring algorithms. One of the most pivotal features of this chatbot is the option to book fixed deposits (FDs) and recurring deposits (RDs) by simply conversing with it, without the need of registration or remembering passwords (only OTP based authentication is required).

The Bot has been widely accepted by the Bank’s customers, testimony to which is Rs.5.2 billion worth deposits booked through YES ROBOT since December, 2018. Even with human errors, the chatbot can identify the intent of the user with over 90% accuracy and over 8.3 million customer interactions have already been reported on YES ROBOT since its launch.

Anup Purohit, Chief Information Officer, YES BANK, added, “We focused on building a holistic AI ecosystem equipped with NLP components, Machine Learning models and other AI services. YES ROBOT is a round-the-clock banking assistant developed by our in-house technology team using Microsoft Azure cognitive services. While customers can launch the chatbot on social media platforms such as Facebook, in future, we plan to integrate the bot and provide access through other channels.”

Going forward, YES BANK plans to integrate the bot with services such as contextual & real-time transfer of chat from bot to the live agent of the Bank;; integration with different platforms and applications such as WhatsApp, Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri to provide the Bank’s services on IoT platforms for customers and other MS cognitive services & tools such as RPA, OCR etc. The Bank also plans to enable cross sell and acquisition services on YES ROBOT as a strategic tool to further empower the sales force.

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