SigFig, a San Francisco fintech specializing in robo advice, today unveiled SigFig Atlas, an interactive platform for financial advice and software-guided sales that faces both retail banks and their customers.

Atlas is meant to help banks provide consistent, personalized financial advice and promptly engage in higher-quality face-to-face conversations with customers, Mike Sha, co-founder and CEO of SigFig, told Bank Innovation.

Sha said this process starts with a discovery experience, not unlike the health history questionnaire patients typically get upon their first visit to a doctor’s office, although conducted digitally. The information collected is then put through a series of algorithms that process, using artificial intelligence (AI), the customer’s unique situation to build recommendations for products such as checking and savings accounts, loans or mortgages.

“What we’re really trying to help the banks do is give better advice and, as a result, almost shift a sales mentality into more of an advice mentality,” Sha said. “Instead of having bankers who are just kind of selling products, what if we could enable those bankers to better understand who their customers are, and what their needs are, and then translate that set of needs into a set of solutions?”

He said one of Atlas’s primary use cases is largely non-digital.

“Giving people personal advice and helping them meet their actual financial objectives mostly happens in a face-to-face environment,” Sha said. “These are oftentimes some of the biggest, scariest, most important financial decisions that customers are making.”

He said the digital aspects of Atlas help bridge an in-person gap between bankers and customers, particularly because the information a bank needs in order to direct customers to the right products can be highly personal in nature.

“The banker actually doesn’t end up asking a lot of those questions because it’s kind of uncomfortable,” he said. “You have a stranger walking in from the street, you just met them and then suddenly you’re in their face asking them questions like, ‘How much debt do you have?’ and ‘How much money do you make?’”

Going back to the doctor’s office analogy, he said patients are more honest when filling out a questionnaire than when answering questions in person from a doctor or nurse.

“The clipboard provides this impersonal, non-judgemental interaction where patients have been shown to be a lot more truthful with what the reality is,” Sha said. “If you extended that analogy to a finance setting, you’d see the same thing.”

Another difficulty, he said, is that there are many kinds of people in many kinds of roles at a typical bank branch. With Atlas, he said the customer can be directed to the right person from the get-go, ensuring a smoother process where the right discussions are taking place between the right people.

While Atlas can be used in-branch for in-person conversations, customers can also access the platform from home and discuss products over the phone or by video. Additionally, customers can elect for self-serve and choose from the products recommended.

The install process requires zero integration lift for banks, Sha said, making implementing and rolling the solution out to customers a matter of weeks rather than quarters or years. He said “quite a few” banks, including big banks, have already signed on for Atlas, but all are still confidential. SigFig counts Wells Fargo, Citizens Bank and UBS among its clients for other white-label products.

It’s worth noting that fintech provider Finastra on Tuesday launched its Fusion Digital Front Office, a tablet-based banking platform enabling community banks and credit unions to take services directly to consumers, outside of the branch. The platform provides bankers a gateway to manage account origination, sales and service, and transaction processing from remote locations.

“It’s no longer enough just to serve customers or members when they walk into your offices,” Vincent Pugliese, SVP and General Manager, U.S. Retail & Lending at Finastra, said in a company release. “Community banks and credit unions need to be able to serve them where they are.”

There are big opportunities to build better employee-facing AI solutions, particularly if a plurality of customers still want to engage with other humans, Alex Carriles, Head of Online Banking at BBVA Compass, said during a panel on customer experience at Bank Innovation Ignite 2019 in Seattle earlier this month. He said for inquiries as simple as why an account received an insufficient funds charge, customers have had to talk to as many as 2 or 3 employees because the employees themselves don’t have the complete picture of a customer’s account available.

He said having the ability for an employee to search the entire knowledge base is a “best of both worlds” scenario where customers get the human touch they want while getting the best answer available, quickly.