The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) has highlighted how AI is playing a key role in enhancing the customer experiences it provides.
A strategic update focused on two main areas where AI has made a significant impact: combating fraud and improving customer support. These are the key areas where AI technology has been most effective within the payments sector, the bank outlined.
Matt Comyn, CEO of CBA, commented: “With more than one in three Australians and almost one in four businesses considering us their main financial institution, we have a huge customer base to serve. Their preferences and expectations continue to shift, and we aim to meet them by delivering distinct, differentiated and compelling propositions.
“Technology, and AI, in particular, are critical in meeting this ambition. AI allows us to deliver better experiences to more customers at a faster rate, and we’re already seeing significant benefits in a variety of use cases.”
Each day, CBA processes and analyses more than 20 million payments. Using generative AI, the bank is able to flag thousands of suspicious transactions and send 20,000 proactive alerts to retail customers via its app.
As a result, customer-reported fraud has been reduced by 30%, and the bank plans to increase the number of daily alerts to 35,000. Additionally, CBA reports that customer losses to scams have reduced by 50%.
Though the majority of financial institutions are using AI to reduce fraud, CBA has taken steps to integrate the tech into its customer-facing messaging services. According to CBA, retail customers now make over 50,000 enquiries a day, a five-fold increase compared to five years ago.
The integration of new machine learning technologies, including generative AI, into CBA’s messaging system is expected to improve response speed, quality and accuracy. This upgrade will also address the 10% of enquiries that the platform currently cannot resolve.
In terms of the bank’s business customers, they are also benefiting from AI as the technology significantly reduces wait times.
In loan applications, AI pre-populates documents using the customer’s information, which has sped up both the application and review process for conditional approval in under 10 minutes. For annual reviews, AI is expected to cut the time needed from around 14 hours to just two hours.
The CBA has come across as one of the most vocal financial institutions when it comes to the adoption of AI. In August, the bank announced it rolled out an AI microlearning series to all its employees.
