Clinc’s Tech, İşbank’s Maxi Featured in American Banker

Clinc customer İşbank – Turkey’s largest private bank – and their virtual assistant Maxi were recently highlighted in a story on American Banker. The article took a deep dive into Maxi and the bank’s ability to quickly deploy new competencies for their customers, using Clinc’s technology, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“…after the novel coronavirus spread to Turkey in March, Maxi started helping customers navigate their loan deferrals and learn about precautions the bank was taking. The conversations between Maxi and İşbank’s customers, which take place over İşbank’s IsCep and Maximum Mobil mobile apps or on WhatsApp, jumped 70%, from 1.8 million in February to 3 million in April.”

İşbank’s success is a textbook example of well implemented conversational AI technology.  As the article points out, the bank was able to move quickly during a crisis because they had dedicated the time and resources to training Maxi when it was first deploy in 2018 – a lesson for banks who have been slow to adopt new technology until now.

“The same strategies – painstakingly collecting data from real people, quickly analyzing new customer concerns as they come up, and uniting data science, design and product employees into one dedicated conversational artificial intelligence team – can be replicated at U.S. banks as well. To date, virtual assistants are scarce in U.S. banks as they try to figure out how to make them work flawlessly and usefully. But all banks are trying to find the right tools to interact with customers at a time when person-to-person interactions are still not possible in most states.”

By using Clinc’s technology İşbank has created a digital banking experience that closely mimics the person-to-person interaction expected when visiting a local branch.  As the article highlights, the crux of Clinc’s product is the ability to analyze speech patterns, word structure and sentiment, so virtual assistants created by Clinc can understand and respond to everyday human speech – no matter how informal the question is, or if it’s phrased indirectly.

“The goal was to make conversations with Maxi as natural as possible, rather than sending users through a decision tree of options.  İşbank also personalized its virtual assistant by integrating customer data so Maxi can interpret more specific questions and deliver insights into spending.”

To date, 5.7 million of İşbank’s 8.2 million mobile banking customers have used Maxi. To learn more about İşbank’s success with Clinc, visit www.clinc.com/maxi. You can read the full article in American Banker, here.