HSBC last week deployed an internal chatbot powered by Google Cloud that can process any document and answer employee policy queries.

Called the Operational Risk and Resilience Application, or ORRA, the bot deployed by the $2.7 trillion HSBC is powered by Google Cloud’s artificial intelligence (AI), technology. ORRA uses conversational AI, via Google’s Dialogflow  natural language processing (NLP) platform, to aid and speed employee  handling of questions about bank frameworks and policies.

The bank’s ORRA project started as a proof-of-concept at the end of 2019, emerged as a product for delivery in May 2020, and was first rolled out in September 2020, said Steve Suarez, HSBC’s global head of innovation, finance and risk. “ORRA was launched with approximately 400 answers and 3,500 questions, and now has approximately 800 answers and 6,500 questions,” Suarez told Bank Innovation News.

The chatbot is available to all HSBC employees on the bank’s intranet, allowing them to obtain direct answers to questions by using NLP to examine large documents of all kinds. Suarez said the bot can process any document, with ingested documents currently consisting of policies, procedures, user guides and briefing papers. The automation also addresses compliance. “While we haven’t done it yet, loading regulation as searchable documents should not be an issue,” he added.

While ORRA is an internal application for HSBC, customer-facing chatbots have already been deployed by banks like TD, U.S. Bank, Bank of America and RBC, which employ usage-driven analytics, like accuracy and response times, to improve app performance.

A recent report from research firm Gartner noted that while automation techniques, such as chatbots, have become increasingly popular among banks as a way deal with customer queries, training the programs with large datasets and long implementation times can be a hurdle for banks.

In its statement announcing ORRA’s release, Google Cloud said the bot can also be trained to support multiple languages and mobile interactions.

“To test ORRA, we looked for geographically dispersed volunteers from various risk and business functions. The objective of doing this was to replicate how staff might ask questions from across the potential user base,” said Suarez. HSBC operates in 64 countries and employs approximately 226,000 people, according to data from Statista.

Looking ahead, HSBC will be implementing a rolling plan of scheduled releases to expand and improve the chatbot’s content every two months, Suarez said.

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