Banks of the future will need to provide context around transactions and personalized guidance for customers’ financial lives.

So runs the conventional wisdom, and some banks are already doing it. (Cue science fiction author William Gibson: “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”)

Neobanks Moven and Simple are leading the way, but they’re now joined by Ally Financial, a branchless, online bank that recently launched a mobile personal assistant with the help of analytics firm Personetics. Called Ally Assist, the product allows users to ask questions — by voice or text — and get relevant answers. Answers may take many forms, including video. It also provides realtime insights into spending and transactions and offers predictions for budgeting and cash flow.

And here’s where the future comes in. The assistant can also learn. As time goes on, it will be customized to better fit the individual user. Personalization is more than just saying the customer’s name, although that doesn’t hurt. It’s about knowing that a quarterly tax payment will lead to a budget shortfall when a particular bill comes due, for instance. Or knowing that the customer prefers texts to emails for bill reminders. To borrow bank consultant Ron Shevlin’s favorite example, the customer also doesn’t need to receive offers from nail salons, thank you very much.

“Based on your behavior, [Ally Assist] will remind you to make a payment and offer insights and feedback on your spending,” said David Sosna, CEO of Personetics. “The mobile user experience is the perfect form in which to deploy this capability. Ally is doing very advanced things in mobile. Their strategy — not having branches — is to offer a high-quality mobile user experience.”

It should be mentioned that Ally’s willingness to disclose its work with Personetics is a coup for Sosna and his team. Personetics has a number of large bank customers. Most do not want to discuss their work with vendors, and there are good reasons for this. Vendors often represent security and regulatory risks for banks, so the less said to the media about them, the better.

Virtual assistants in banking apps are not new — USAA and US Bank have both used them to streamline the mobile user experience — but the Personetics solution goes beyond that, promising a user’s data and behavior will tell the bank how to better serve them. Are people comfortable with their bank acting, in Sosna’s words, “like the NSA?”

Personetics thinks so. “Actually, people are quite happy about it,” Sosna said. He said the company has seen a positive response rate of over 90% in its tests with other banks. And people can use the help. Sosna related that when customers of a certain Personetics bank (not Ally) travel internationally, say to Europe, and make a purchase, the app offers the option of paying in euros or dollars.

“The correct answer is euros,” Sosna said. “But more than 60% of people think it’s dollars. If they pay with dollars, the merchant performs the currency conversion.” And merchants, of course, don’t offer the best rate. The app, if so empowered by the bank, can recommend the better course. In this small way, it helps customers make better decisions. This is merely the tip of the iceberg, Sosna said.

“Analytics can do a lot,” he said. “The original attempts were by vendors and focused on selling products. But financial services companies can now focus on people. The second-generation solution puts us in a place to provide meaningful advice, combining data with learning and understanding more and more. The ultimate goal is to engage the customer in multiple ways and be of service.”