The Royal Bank of Canada, Canada’s largest bank, is seeing results from its $3.2 billion investment in digital transformation. In a second-quarter earnings call on Thursday, the bank reported that year-over-year digital adoption (desktop and mobile) increased to 52 percent of users (up 3% from a year ago) and 90-day active mobile users increased 17% from one year ago to 4.1 million, resulting in a 25% increase in mobile sessions.

The growth of digital banking is partly attributable to a series of upgrades that RBC has made to its mobile banking app. Two years ago, RBC launched an AI-based tool called NOMI to track customers’ spending and offer insights on spending patterns (called NOMI Insights), as well as find extra cash and automatically transfer it to a savings account (called NOMI Find & Save). This past April, it rolled out a feature called NOMI Budgets, which crafts suggested budgets for customers based on its analysis of their spending behavior.

To RBC, personal finance management tools are now must-have features to meet customer expectations. “Digital money management tools such as automated savings and budgeting are core aspects of supporting clients in their everyday banking,” said Rami Thabet, RBC’s vice president of digital product, in an interview with Bank Innovation. “It’s a core component of the experience we need to provide our customer base.”

With NOMI, RBC includes some features that third-party money finance management apps like Digit and Qapital offer their customers and takes that a step further with predictive budgeting and direct deposits into savings accounts. For the customer, the added benefit is not having to download an additional app to use these features.

According to RBC, as of February, NOMI Find & Save clients have saved more than $83 million, with active users saving an average of C$180 per month. “Solutions such as NOMI are based on AI because we need to figure out for each individual what their spending patterns are,” said Eran Livneh, chief marketing officer at Personetics, the company that developed the technology behind NOMI. “In less than half a second, you have to deliver the most relevant and important [spending] information and recommendations for each person.”

Livneh added that banks like RBC realize they need to turn their mobile apps into digital money management centers, packing in as many personal finance and insights tools as possible to meet customer expectations. “Banks understand that they need to be the ones to help their customers better manage their financial lives on a day-to-day basis,” he said. “They understand that launching [additional apps for money management] is not the right way to do it; it needs to be integrated with what people are doing day to day.”

Editor’s Note: The headline and first paragraph were updated post-publication, reflecting that the percentage of digital banking users grew to 52 percent of RBC’s user base, and not by 52 percent as earlier reported.