Bianca Chan
Hi, everyone. I’m Bianca Chan and welcome to the Buzz from Bank Automation News, where we explore how automation technology is transforming the banking industry. This is our weekly wrap for what’s happening in the industry this week. And before beginning I’d like to give a big thanks to our BAN advertisers. Fiserv and MX, thank you so much for your support. I’m pleased to be joined by Loraine Lawson, associate editor at Bank automation news. Lorraine. Welcome. It is. It is February 5 2021. And here are this week’s biggest news items from our editorial team. Irene, you covered some interesting developments at CBC one of the big five banks in Canada. Can you give us a lowdown on on what’s going on there and what you found out this week?

Loraine Lawson
Yes, so CB CNBC is using an app power technology to offer customers personalized recommendations on their finances. Just kind of interesting, you could actually grow your budget with this, instead of having to sit down and do your budgeting all at once. It will sort of help you grow your budget. And it’ll offer customers things like did you notice this recurring bill was higher this month than usual, or you spent $63 on six subscriptions in January. And so you can sort of look at what those subscriptions are and see if you want to cancel any. It might tell you if you spent more on entertainment this month, or that you have an extra $100 in your checking account and ask you if you want to transfer the money, giving you an opportunity to do it right there in the mobile app.

Bianca Chan
Interesting. And so this AI tech is it developed you know if it’s developed in house or if or civc tap to FinTech to help develop that.

Loraine Lawson
No it did you go to a FinTech, I talked to Greg slay who’s the project General Manager at MX MX offer solutions and data analytics management, API Management, mobile banking apps, and personal finance management. So they brought a package.

Bianca Chan
Yeah, I see. I see. Yeah, you know, it’s interesting, this automated savings are kind of like predictive proactive insights around spending or, you know, financial habits is something that we’ve kind of seen ramp up over the past, I guess, couple years, but really over the past year, similar news, actually, that I covered out of RBC Royal Bank of Canada. They have their AI backed virtual assistant called Nomi, which we’ve covered extensively, the bank has basically built out the AI algorithm to handle a variety of different banking services around saving, budgeting, providing insights. So similar to what you’re saying. However, they’re actually using technology from the conversational AI for person etics, which also works with I think, Allied US Bank as well. And they’ve added their own sort of their own software on top of that, so kind of interesting to see the different comparisons in the space. This week, we spoke with the VP of digital products there. And he he told us that the bank is looking to deploy the Noemi capabilities on the web platform. Currently, it’s only available on mobile, so they’ll have some I guess replumbing to do on the back end to make sure you know, all the systems are omni channel and talk to each other. And news of these plans, these development plans come on the heels of some decent traction on the automated savings tool called Nomi. Find and safe, which essentially uses predictive technology to find money that customers can spare and then kind of automatically sets it aside for them. So we’re seeing this automated savings trend for sure, at least at the beginning of this year, I believe. Chase mentioned to us earlier in January, that their automated savings tools also kind of picked up traction. So it’ll be interesting to see how that kind of plays out and where it grows from there. I know you also spoke with sunrise banks about their new automation strike team. Do you want to tell us a little bit more about what that is? And kind of like how the bank came to form that team?

Loraine Lawson
Yes, I talked to CEO Brett Cooksey and he actually came from ch Robinson which was a very digital company. He was the director of digitalization there and now of course he’s CEO at sunrise and he’s bringing some of that digitalization and Autumn is ministation to sunrise bait which has been traditionally a more manual oriented bake. So he very interesting automation story there. They started with automating PPP, and he was able to feed them data assets from the PPP first round and in the second round in first round, it was very hard to get them to use it second round, they couldn’t stop asking for more. So he is moving ahead with more automation projects at sunrise and as part of that the first thing they will try to automate is a hC hC transactions and So he’s hiring expecting to hire four to six new employees to do that, including a solutions architect who he said will need to understand API, a business analyst who can moonlight as a scrum master and a secondary senior engineer who will basically the Codemasters sort of an infrastructure engineer and a support analyst.

Bianca Chan
That’s really interesting. Now, do you know how big sunrise banks is? Are they around a billion and a half in assets?

Loraine Lawson
Us? Yes, I believe that’s correct.

Bianca Chan
Yeah, that’s interesting, because what we’ve kind of seen is smaller banks. A saying that automation may kind of take away the personal banking aspect that community banks, you know, are so well known for, but also that they, that smaller institutions typically are constrained by budgeting when it comes to automation technology. But it’s kind of interesting how Brett was able to get, you know, the rest of senior leadership on board to kind of allocate the funds to this team to kind of build out the bank’s automation efforts.

Loraine Lawson
I think, you know, part of the key for that was they saw they, they were able to do that in house. So they were able to be very responsive to the business whenever there was an issue in a way that maybe a secondhand vendor wouldn’t be able to do or partner wouldn’t be able to do any credits that with some of the cultural acceptance that he was like that, you know, if I made a mistake, I admitted it, and we fixed it. So he’s a very entertaining individual, very bright individuals. So yeah,

Bianca Chan
very interesting. Do you have a sense for any sort of other automation projects that or from our own reporting, and seeing trends of maybe other other processes that that the bank may look to automate?

Loraine Lawson
Well, I thought it was interesting, you were talking about many banks not wanting to automate too much because they fear like a backlash from customers. So it’s interesting that they’re choosing to go with a CH automation, which is sort of going to be invisible to the customers, right? It’ll make for a faster transaction experience for the bank and their business partners. But it won’t really affect affect the customers too much. But as far as that he said, that would be the first place they would look to automate. And then, you know, go from there.

Bianca Chan
Fantastic. And so Loraine, can you give us a taste for me what you have on the docket for next week’s reporting?

Loraine Lawson
Sure. So there’s some interesting things going on and risk management, we’re going to take a look at maybe some of the trends and what’s being automated automation isn’t new for risk management, but sort of looking at what are the challenges this coming year that CEOs and CHIEF RISK officers will need to tackle hopefully using automation. And then we’ll also be maybe reporting on the recent news that Bank of New York Mellon is going to be automating some of their Treasury transactions with Google.

Bianca Chan
Interesting, interesting. You mentioned Google, we know that Google Cloud has been making further steps into the banking world. So it’ll be interesting to see what the implications of that deal are.

Loraine Lawson
Yes, certainly.

Bianca Chan
Great. Well, thank you so much for, for participating and for visiting with us at the buzz please let us know how we’re doing at Bank automation news.com and of course on Twitter and LinkedIn, and we’ll see you next time.

Loraine Lawson
Thank you.