Artificial intelligence is beginning to transform how banks deliver financial advice, helping institutions provide personalized recommendations based on individual customer behavior. Rather than requiring customers to seek out financial guidance, AI-powered banking assistants can proactively identify opportunities to save money, manage spending, and make better financial decisions.
Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) and Israel Discount Bank are demonstrating the potential of AI in banking through virtual assistants powered by Personetics. Early results suggest that personalized financial insights can increase mobile banking engagement, encourage savings, and reduce customer service demands. These implementations also highlight how banks can use existing customer data to deliver more relevant financial services.
How RBC and Discount Bank Use AI for Personalized Banking
This article in Forbes discusses how two banks, RBC and Israel Discount Bank are now delivering financial advice to their customers using an AI platform sold by Personetics. The benefits detailed in the article should catch our attention, in just the first 8 months of operation RBC has delivered 200 million insights to customers which has increased the use of the banking app from 3 to 5 times a week and RBC claims it increased the opening of savings accounts by 20%. Discount Bank indicates that the volume of customer queries coming to the bank’s call center were significantly reduced and that customer’s ranked the information and experience a 4.3 out of 5:
“Both banks have added AI capabilities to their mobile banking applications by working with Personetics, a FinTech startup that combines financial services domain expertise with deep knowledge and experience with predictive analytics, machine learning and natural language understanding technologies. And top management at both banks understands that “digital,” in banking and elsewhere, means “data for personalization and precise predictions.”
Successful AI implementations are putting to good use the massive amounts of data that’s been accumulated by “digital transformation”—automating manual processes and moving transactions online, including most interactions with customers. The data boom is a two-fold data boon: It allows for personalization, for turning a mass service into an individualized and customized service, based on a specific customer’s behavior, preferences, and requirements. And it allows for continuously improving insights, efficiently derived from the behavior, preferences, and requirements of numerous customers, analyzed in the aggregate. Understanding what data can do for you—and your customer—is today’s foundation of competitive differentiation.
RBC’s AI-driven virtual assistant is called NOMI (as in “know-me”). Discount Bank’s is called DiDi (as in “Discount Digital”). The virtual assistants respond to customers’ questions and requests, identify funds in a customer’s cash flow that can be automatically moved to a savings account, alert customers to any anomaly and unusual activity in their accounts, and proactively offer personalized financial management insights and advice, including predicting future cash flow.
During the first eight months following NOMI’s launch, it has provided 200 million insights to the bank’s customers (RBC’s mobile app is used by about 3.6 million customers). It has contributed to a significant increase in the use of the mobile app (from 3 times per week to 5 times per week on average) and to an increase of 20% in the opening of savings accounts.
Discount Bank’s DiDi has considerably reduced the volume of customer queries coming to the bank’s call center. And the average customer rating of DiDi’s insights is 4.3 (out of 5). “We see Didi not as a new service or a product, but as a conceptual change in the way our customers consume banking and in how we serve them,” says Discount’s Frishman.”
Expanding AI Applications Across Banking and Financial Services
The article goes on to describe additional work RBC is executing around AI and also offers results from a large scale survey that indicates the level of activity being invested in AI across multiple industries.
The early results from RBC and Israel Discount Bank demonstrate how AI in banking can create measurable benefits for both financial institutions and their customers. By turning transaction data into personalized financial insights, banks can help customers better understand their finances while strengthening engagement with digital banking services.
RBC’s reported increase in mobile app usage and savings account openings illustrates the potential for AI-powered financial advice to influence customer behavior. Meanwhile, Discount Bank’s reduction in call center inquiries suggests that intelligent virtual assistants can improve operational efficiency while maintaining customer satisfaction.
As financial institutions continue investing in artificial intelligence, the ability to deliver timely, relevant, and actionable insights is becoming an important competitive differentiator. Banks that successfully combine customer data, predictive analytics, and personalized financial guidance are positioning themselves to build stronger customer relationships and improve the overall digital banking experience.
Overview by Tim Slone, VP, Payments Innovation at Mercator Advisory Group
