Digital communications company Eltropy recently announced its acquisition of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven platform Marsview to streamline the contact center experience for consumers.

The increasing need for digital communications during the COVID-19 pandemic set the company on a path of improving its text messaging, video banking and digital voice capabilities, according to Eltropy founder and Chief Executive Ashish Garg.

“Once you have communication and automation, the third natural layer is what we call ‘intelligence layer,’” Garg told Bank Automation News. “We can take all the data from all these conversations, parse them through AI, and create intelligence for decision makers and financial institutions. So, the reason we bought Marsview is for the automation and the intelligence they have.”

Contact center teams at financial institutions can use the Marsview platform to route customers to the correct department or individual, resolving customer inquiries and even integrating speech recognition and biometric authentication to keep client account details secure, according to the company.

Marsview’s platform runs on API’s that can detect several different factors — such as sentiment or emotion — when it comes to voice and video conversations with customers, thereby enhancing the customer experience, Marsview founder and Chief Executive Murali Mahalingam told BAN.

“As an example, API is a core part of Eltropy’s platform. At the same time, we integrate with third-party systems through APIs, and that’s how the entire system gets implemented,” Mahalingam said.

Garg says that the ability to customize Marsview’s AI platform and the built-in functionality with Eltropy’s communications software was what drove the acquisition.

“A lot of companies are taking their pick of what Google or Amazon has and are building on top of that,” Garg said. “What’s unique about [Marsview] is that instead of using open-source technology, they build models from scratch. That was very compelling for us.”

Eltropy’s acquisition was the company’s second since May; the first purchase was of video banking platform POPi/o, Garg said.

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