{"id":189027,"date":"2017-07-31T07:30:01","date_gmt":"2017-07-31T05:30:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=189027"},"modified":"2017-07-31T07:30:01","modified_gmt":"2017-07-31T05:30:01","slug":"sweden-rolls-out-robots-for-banking-clients","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/banking\/189027\/sweden-rolls-out-robots-for-banking-clients\/","title":{"rendered":"Sweden rolls out robots for banking clients"},"content":{"rendered":"

Aida is the perfect employee: always courteous, always learning and, as she says, \u201calways at work, 24\/7, 365 days a year.\u201d<\/p>\n

Aida, of course, is not a person but a virtual customer-service representative that SEB AB, one of Sweden\u2019s biggest banks, is rolling out. The goal is to give the actual humans more time to engage in more complex tasks.<\/p>\n

After blazing a trail in online and digital banking, Sweden\u2019s financial industry is now emerging as a pioneer in the use of artificial intelligence. Besides Aida at SEB, there\u2019s Nova, which is a chatbot Nordea Bank AB is introducing at its life and pensions unit in Norway.<\/p>\n

Swedbank AB is adding to the skills of its virtual assistant, Nina. All three are designed to sound like women, based on research suggesting customers feel more comfortable with female voices.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are some frequent, simple tasks that we need to deal with manually today, and in that effort we\u2019re looking into AI to see how we can deploy it, and Aida is one,\u201d\u00a0 Johan Torgeby, the chief executive officer of SEB, said in an interview.<\/p>\n

Chatbots have access to vast amounts of individual client data, meaning they can quickly handle straightforward customer requests. That in turn frees up human employees to deal with more complex services, like coming up with the best mortgage plan to suit a specific customer.<\/p>\n

\u201cBasically all banks are closing branches,\u201d Mattias Fras, head of Robotics, Strategy and Innovation at Nordea, said in a phone interview. \u201cThis is a way to return to full service again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nordea\u2019s chatbot will eventually help customers who want investment advice, who want to cancel lost credit cards or to open savings accounts.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Winning Over Customers<\/h3>\n

Swedish banks have already seen their customer satisfaction scores drop\u00a0to a 20-year low after shutting branches and pushing people onto online services.<\/p>\n

But AI might be part of the cure. According to a recent study by market researcher GfK, there are wide gaps between what consumers hope to receive from banks in terms of service and financial advice, and what they actually get. AI applications such as chatbots \u201chold the promise of filling in these service gaps, given the right data and programming,\u201d GfK said.<\/p>\n

Swedbank, which already operates its chatbot Nina in Sweden and plans to roll it out to its Baltic markets as well, says one of the benefits to the technology is that it eases users into the new digital age.<\/p>\n

AI \u201ccan help our customers become more digitized, for example by guiding a client in paying bills on the Internet,\u201d Swedbank spokeswoman Josefine Uppling said.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Read: Artificial Intelligence is the next battleground: Naspers<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After blazing a trail in online and digital banking, Sweden\u2019s financial industry is now emerging as a pioneer in the use of artificial intelligence. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":79447,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[961],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-189027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-banking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189027","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189027"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189027\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":189033,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189027\/revisions\/189033"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/79447"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}