Digital bank Varo is working with employees to find use cases for AI and train them on using the tech to optimize its capabilities. 

The $282 million Varo Bank launched its AI academy this month to teach employees how to use the tech and encourage them to suggest AI use cases within their daily operations to gain efficiency, Asmau Ahmed, the company’s first chief AI and data officer, told FinAi News.

“This is going to be co-creating AI solutions, hands-on keys with ‘Varovians’ [bank employees], building AI ambassadors within the company, or launching prompt works, which is sourcing prompts from across the company, testing them, using them,” Ahmed said. “It’s enabling that AI-first bank approach from the inside out.” 

Before launching the academy, Ahmed conducted a companywide survey to understand how efficient employees are with AI and what they plan to do with the tech, she said. Employees are excited to use AI in their operations, she added. 

Varo is embedding AI ambassadors into departments across the organization who can help employees get up to speed on using the tech and collecting ideas for further deployment, Ahmed said. 

“We have micro-training sessions” for employees who are learning how to use the tech. Rather, it involves a crash course on AI within a few hours to bring employees up to speed that want to start from scratch, she said. The courses are elective to meet different needs of employees. 

The bank has 355 employees, with nearly one-third enrolled in the AI academy, Ahmed said. 

Other FIs working with employees to find AI use cases include: 

• $3.4 billion Academy Bank; 

• $1.3 billion Grasshopper Bank; and 

• $1.3 trillion TD Bank. 

AI deployment 

Varo is breaking the use of AI into two categories — internal deployment for efficiency and external deployment for customer satisfaction, Ahmed said. 

The bank is evaluating AI deployment internally for: 

• Compliance; 

• HR functions; and 

• Engineering. 

Those areas can lead to improved customer experience by providing them with more personalized offerings, Ahmed said. 

The bank has a proprietary machine learning model for underwriting consumer loans, she said, adding that it is in the process of upgrading our lending models that ensure fair and compliant lending practices through better use of AI. 

The bank is being cautious in deploying gen AI for consumer-facing operations and plans to introduce it internally before giving it to consumers, Ahmed said. 

“We’ve been very careful about how we use generative AI to protect our privacy and consumer information, but it is part of our plan to utilize it safely,” she said. 

The bank is evaluating the use of gen AI for AML, compliance and risk management, Ahmed said. 

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