EXCLUSIVE- The Canadian banking startup Koho was looking for ways to engage its customer base. Its engineers were also looking for a side project. What they came up with was a way to make billpay easier, and a bot, called Kbot, to smooth the way.

The Toronto-based startup, which demoed at Bank Innovation 2015 in Seattle and launched in March 2017, offers a mobile banking solution and prepaid card issued by Vancouver, B.C.-based Peoples Trust Company.

Billpay is a famously “sticky” feature — once a user inputs their billpay information, changing banks becomes a chore. Koho built a visual bill-reader that can view bills on-screen or on papaer and port the data into the banking app through the ever-more powerful smartphone camera.

“Our customers come to us because they want something different,” said Kris Hansen, chief technology officer at Koho. “It’s almost a kind of counter-culture.” In the interest of offering more than a standard mobile banking experience, Hansen and team built the photo billpay option, backed by the machine-learning powered Kbot.

Photo billpay is not new — in 2013 U.S. Bank became the first large bank in the U.S. to launch it — but it is still not widely adopted. Malauzai, the mobile banking service provider, provides data from time to time on mobile photo billpay use, but has not done so yet in 2018. Malauzai, incidentally, was the provider who helped First Financial in Abilene, Texas, become the very first American bank to ever launch photo billpay, which it calls PicturePay.

Koho’s service relies on visual learning and convolutional neural networks, Hansen said, or the Hot Dog/Not Hot Dog calculation. The differences in bills can be subtle, but bills can also vary widely in form. All these factors need to be taken into account. Kbot can currently recognize about 200 types of bills, with the goal of reaching 1,000 soon. “We’re training the bot on recognizing who’s the payee, what’s the account number, what’s the structure of the bill,” he said.

The Kbot service is currently undergoing internal testing, before being turned over to customers. Koho customers skew younger and more tech-savvy, so testing new features can potentially happen right in the app. The internal testing led to some interesting conversations, Hansen said. “One person had a cable bill for $15 a month, and we all said, ‘How do you pay so little for cable?'”

The struggle for all neobanks is how to get customers motivated enough to make a change, Hansen said. “So we’re making it easier to pay bills, change payroll and direct deposit, and we have a feature coming out to improve how we do goals and budgeting,” Hansen said.