U.K. challenger bank Metro Bank could extend its AI-driven money management tool Insights, designed for its retail side, to its business customers.

Formed in partnership with Israel-based AI company Personetics, Insights will be rolled out in beta over the summer. After that phase, it will be available to the rest of Metro Bank’s retail customers via its mobile banking app. But the bank’s Digital Director Alex Park sees potential to expand the tool to its SME customers.

“We have the technological capabilities to do this, we have a best in-class API system built with Google, Personetics’ algorithm is self-learning, so once we launch, we’ll have customers rate the tool. We can take their feedback, tweak the app and apply it to other areas of our business. So, we are in a good place and there is a lot of opportunity with Insights that we can explore,” Park told Bank Innovation. 

The broad concept of Insights, Eran Livneh, VP of marketing for Personetics explained, is that it is a financial cognitive platform that is channel-agnostic.

“Personetics’s product allows banks to configure nuances as they want on whatever medium they choose,” Livneh told Bank Innovation. “We provide them with APIs and widgets. They can modify the language, the tone, and basically choose whatever approach they see [as] useful for their customers.”

With Insights, Metro Bank’s Park said the demand for such a tool came from the bank’s customers.

“We partnered with Personetics, because we do not have the in-house capability to develop an analytics engine,” Park said.

Typically, Metro Bank has an in-house innovation team that works on products and services that are buildable with the bank’s existing technology. One example of this, according to Park,  is international payment features.

But since Insights is a more complex engine, the bank sought out a fintech partner.

Insights will appear on Metro Bank’s mobile app as an opt-in choice, Park said.

The tool looks at a customer’s transaction data in realtime, and based on that data learns about the consumer’s needs and spending patterns, Livneh explained. It then uses this understanding to predict what kinds of things the customer may do or even what they may need in the future, he said.

“There is also a retrospective aspect,” Metro Bank’s Park said. This means the app can consider common spending habits as well as reoccurring expenses, and provide the customer tailored insights on how to spend money along with charts and analysis. Right now, U.K.-based digital current accounts fintech Loot does a great job providing a similar tool.

“We basically use AI and machine learning to combine realtime data with historical data, to help customers manage their money,” Personetics’ Livneh said.

Aside from Metro Bank, Personetics has partnered with UK bank Tandem on an AI-driven tool. It has also worked with Royal Bank of Canada on its mobile money management tool, Nomi.

Metro Bank was the first challenger bank in the U.K and the first to receive a banking license from the Financial Services Authority in March 2010. Currently, the bank has around 1.2 million accounts.

It is one of the few challenger banks that has a dual strategy of digital presence along with physical branches. Park could not reveal the number of its mobile banking users.