EXCLUSIVE – There has been plenty of buzz around voice banking for some time now, and while many thought 2017 would be the year voice banking made it big, that didn’t happen. And that’s not because the field didn’t make any progress – it did- but the fintech world had other distractions (hint: blockchain & cryptocurrency, to name a few).

It looks like the attention owed to voice banking last year will be given to the space this year.

For instance, Royal Bank of Canada’s Rami Thabet, vice president of mobile banking at RBC, told Bank Innovation that it will be focusing heavily on its voice banking efforts over the next few months.

Thabet told Bank Innovation that it is currently exploring several applications for voice banking with its AI-powered service Nomi, available in the bank’s mobile app.

In the U.S., Bank of America is set to launch its AI powered bot Erica in a matter of weeks, Michelle Moore, head of digital banking at BofA told Bank Innovation. Erica will use voice, in addition to in-app messaging, to perform banking transactions.

Then there’s financial technology solutions provider Fiserv, which is also working on its voice banking products, Kobi Magnezi, director of product management of Digital Banking Platform at Fiserv, told Bank Innovation.

“We launched the platform last year, and this year we are working with our clients on how they can use voice to interact with their clients,” he said.

For instance, Fiserv is currently working on incorporating voice banking in Facebook’s messenger platform for some of its banking customers. Magnezi could not provide names of those clients.

Through its Corrilian Online platform, it is already working with some institutions on incorporating voice banking applications in chat bots and expanding the capability from retrieval of information to support actual transactions.

There is also room to apply voice banking capabilities to other channels like Slack and Twitter, he said. Whether Fiserv was currently working on specific projects related to this, Magnezi could not say.

And indeed, consumers are ready to use voice banking. According to a previous Bank Innovation report, 41% of consumers said they are open to the idea of using platforms like Siri or Alexa to interact with their banks.

Speaking of Alexa, it’s hard to imagine that e-commerce giant Amazon will not use Alexa and voice banking features in its reported banking venture.