United Arab Emirates-based digital bank Liv on Wednesday launched its virtual assistant Olivia, which was built by conversational AI company Kasisto.
Olivia, a play on the bank’s name Liv, can check balances and give spending insights through text and the bank’s mobile app. Liv, a digital bank geared towards millennials in the U.A.E, has 210,000 customers and is adding 10,000 new customers per month, Bank Innovation has learned.
The deal marks another big partnership for New York-based Kasisto. Just weeks ago, Kasisto announced its partnership with Hong Kong’s Standard Chartered Bank in creating the virtual assistant Stacy. And in January, Kasisto deployed TD Bank’s virtual assistant Clari. It also signed a deal with JPMorgan Chase, but details of the type of product have yet to be disclosed.
“For JPMorgan, we came in as a part of what they call a strategy to ‘unleash AI,” Dror Oren, co-founder and vice president of product at Kasisto, told Bank Innovation. “The product is for the bank’s treasury and corporate department.”
Kasisto creates virtual assistants for banks on its conversational AI platform, KAI. The platform is trained by a group of AI engineers in the company’s New York office. The platform does not use machine translation, which means the platform has to be trained in a particular language from the ground up.
The process might take longer, but it’s worth it, according to Oren. “Machine translating or using Neural Network Learning doesn’t work well for this type of product. It does not catch the nuance of languages and human intent. For instance, English spoken in India is very different from English spoken in Canada. From the use of words, sentences, to even how they write the date, it’s all different.”
To avoid any errors, he said it’s best to train the AI platform in a specific language using human beings.
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“We are for a company that specializes only in financial services,” Oren said. Adding that this is another characteristic that separates it from others in the field.
“For our customers, it’s basically the first time they are rolling out a bot,” Oren said. “We work with the bank to create the bot’s persona, as well as work with them through risk and compliance, but our goal is to give them enough tools to make them self-sufficient.”
Self-sufficiency and time-to-market are two key factors in a fintech-bank partnership, Oren said.
Rob Guilfoyle, CEO of Abe AI, would agree. On a panel at the Bank Innovation Ignite conference in Seattle earlier this month, Guilfoyle noted that the shorter the time from proof of concept to time-to-market, the better. This is a crucial requirement for a successful fintech-bank partnership, Guilfoyle said.
“There’s a reason why our customers choose us,” Oren said. “It’s because we have a solution that is in live production; meaning KAI is an AI ‘out of the box’ product designed to go live to market and quickly.”
KAI is currently live in four languages across seven markets: United States, India, Indonesia, Canada, Hong Kong, UAE and Singapore. Aside from geographic expansion, Kasisto is looking at wealth management and insurance as potential sectors to enter later this year or early next year.






