NEW YORK — Citizens Bank will launch a virtual assistant, Digital Butler, on its commercial banking app in the next quarter, Jo Wyper, executive vice president of commercial digital operations at Citizens Bank, told Bank Automation News at Finovate Fall 2023.
The $222 billion bank’s Digital Butler launched in February but was only available on the bank’s web platform, Wyper said.
“Consumer always has apps. Commercial hasn’t really done that before for two reasons — complexity and also personalization is difficult,” she said.
For example, commercial clients could have 200 people who want to interact with the digital assistant. Identifying the individual and what authority they have is difficult, she said.
To keep up with client interactions on the commercial side, the bank drops new codes every quarter. It has begun implementing AI tools to allow the Digital Butler to evolve into correctly predicting client needs, she said.
Generative AI
In August, Digital Butler tackled 30,000 queries from commercial banking clients from 3,000 customers and showed a success rate of 40% to 60%, Wyper said.
The bank is exploring the use of generative AI for its Digital Butler to decrease the need for human assistance but still provide human intervention, when necessary, Wyper said. Generative AI can help identify customers and predict which products they might need, Wyper said.
In the second quarter, Citizens increased its tech spend by 9% to $177 million and announced plans to migrate all its operations to the cloud by 2025.
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