KBC’s K’Ching app introduces AI chatbot for youth market
By KBC
As from today the latest version of the KBC K’Ching app, the KBC mobile banking app for youngsters, will be available in app stores for all K’Ching users. This latest version allows users to communicate through instant messaging with the app through an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot.
KBC has introduced this feature in response to the preference of young people to use instant messaging to communicate with their brands and in order to experiment with the use of chatbots.
The interactive chatbot (using AI) was built in cooperation with IBM, using IBM’s Watson Conversation. The K’Ching chatbot is IBM’s first test in Belgium with Watson Conversation in Dutch. In the near future, K’Ching users will be able to use speech to get things done on K’Ching or ask K’Ching for information or … a quick joke.
KBC first built a “Youngster” AI chatbot on Messenger and invited a subset of the youngsters community to take part in this experiment, in order to ‘train’ the chatbot.
In April , KBC replaced the primitive keyword conversation chatbot, that had been in K’Ching from the beginning, with the AI chatbot with Watson and just let youngsters discover it, by way of test. By the end of May, KBC had addressed as many as 25.000 questions.
The latest developments in the release of 21 June focus on:
- conversation style money transfer,
- addition of savings goals,
- fingerprint logon and signing (taking into account the highest security standards),
- and last but not least, AI chatbot integration with IBM Watson conversation in Dutch. In the future, the technology might be expanded to include additional Watson services.
KBC wants to enrich the chatbot and integrate it with KBC systems allowing users to request account balances or ask for a new bank card.
KBC also plans to add new features every month, e.g. personalised themes.
KBC has already received several requests to make the platform available to all youngsters.
