NatWest engages IBM to revamp chatbot service with generative AI
NatWest has selected IBM’s Watsonx platform to integrate generative AI into its virtual assistant service Cora.
NatWest taps IBM for Cora revamp
Branded as ‘Cora+’, the bank says that its expanded chatbot has “been designed to provide a more accessible and human interaction for customers”.
Developed in collaboration with IBM, NatWest claims that the service is able to provide “conversational responses to complex customer queries”, ranging from product comparisons to general information about the bank and career opportunities.
This scope has been achieved by leveraging generative AI to draw on multiple different sources of information, which the bank says were previously inaccessible to legacy versions of the chatbot.
NatWest first introduced Cora in 2017 and has previously operated it as a text-based service that it says could answer 200 basic banking queries.
Wendy Redshaw, chief digital information officer of NatWest Group’s retail bank, says that leveraging “the latest generative AI innovations” forms part of its attempt to make the service “feel even more ‘human’ and, most importantly, a trusted, safe and reliable digital partner for our customers”.
The bank’s business and technology units collaborated with the IBM client engineering team based in New York to co-create, test and validate the outcomes produced by Cora+ to ensure both their accuracy and speed of delivery.
John Duigenan, general manager, global financial services industry at IBM, adds that with the correct guardrails and governance to ensure that the technology can remain “open, trusted and targeted”, banks will be able to “deliver an empowering value proposition enabling an even deeper level of customer loyalty”.
NatWest says that its customers will retain the ability to speak with branch representatives over the phone as part of a multilayer customer experience that it hopes will position it as “a relationship bank in a digital world”.
