How NCR And Kasisto Have Linked to Widen AI Availability for Banks’ Digital Channels

With consumer demand for personalized digital experiences growing, NCR Corp. announced Monday it is integrating Kasisto Inc.’s KAI digital experience platform in its digital-banking platform.

Kasisto’s KAI platform uses automated conversational banking technology to interact with consumers through digital channels in a human-like way. This allows banks to deploy intelligent, virtual assistants to assist customers in digital channels, which tend to be self-service-oriented. 

Virtual agents enable banks to deepen customer relationships by recommending more relevant products and information. For example, the engine behind a bank’s automated chat application can access a customer’s transaction history and account profile during a customer query and analyze that information to recommend products that better fit the customer’s needs, such as a low-interest loan, higher-yield account, or a better budgeting strategy.

Accessing this kind of information during a digital customer interaction can improve product discovery and deepen customer engagement and loyalty, which in turn drives growth for the financial institution. 

“This is a technology that allows us to extend personalization during digital customer interactions by rapidly analyzing data and recommending more relevant products and content to the customer,” says Douglas Brown, senior vice president and general manager for NCR Digital Banking.  

NCR will initially make Kasisto’s technology available for use in self-service channels. Future plans call for NCR to use the technology in other digital channels, such as ATMs. Longer-range plans call for use of Kasisto’s artificial-intelligence technology to guide service agents on how to interact with consumers.

“In other words, we will use the technology to advise the adviser on how to advise the client,” Brown says. 

While Brown says the technology is too new to quantify how it will engender loyalty, he adds that the more interaction consumers have with their financial institution, especially through digital channels, the more profitable those customers become.

“Customers that engage digitally are 35% more profitable than those that don’t,” says Brown. “We also know that customers that engage digitally, engage more often, which improves their overall profitability.” 

New York City-based Kasisto expects that its partnership with NCR will allow financial institutions of all sizes “to re-imagine their digital experiences from the edge of the digital banking application, to the digital core of how every bank operates,” says chief executive and cofounder Zor Gorelov. 

This in turn will ensure smoother and stress-free banking interactions, promote financial well-being, and deliver the digital experiences banking customers want, and financial institutions need, he adds.