Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) has outlined how artificial intelligence is helping to transform the experiences it delivers to its 10 million-plus customers.
At a key update in Sydney, the CBA reportedly showcased the role technology and AI are playing in delivering a number of improved outcomes for customers, including the following:
A reported 50 per cent reduction in customer scam losses, aided by the implementation and use of safety and security features which “use AI, including NameCheck, CallerCheck and CustomerCheck.”
In addition, there was reportedly a 30 per cent drop in customer-reported frauds due to measures like Gen AI-powered suspicious transaction alerts; and, AI-powered app messaging helping to reduce the overall call centre wait times by “40 per cent over the last financial year.”
CBA outlined some of the “potential” future benefits it expected AI to deliver, including significant time savings via “automated annual reviews for business customers and bankers.”
CBA CEO Matt Comyn said building deeper customer relationships remained at the centre of the Bank’s strategy, with AI playing “an important role in delivering superior customer experiences.”
CBA processes and analyses more than 20 million payments a day. With the aid of Gen AI, the Bank is now flagging “thousands of transactions that look suspicious and sending 20,000 proactive warning alerts per day to retail customers via the app.”
The initiative has played a central role in reducing customer-reported fraud by 30 per cent, and the Bank will now ‘scale the service to 35,000 proactive alerts a day.”
The Bank has introduced Gen AI to its customer-facing messaging services, one of only a few banks globally “to have taken this step.”
Messaging is a service channel increasingly popular with retail customers who use it to make more than “50,000 enquiries a day – a five-fold increase on usage five years ago.”
The introduction of new machine learning technologies, including Gen AI, into CBA’s messaging infrastructure is expected to increase the “speed, quality, and precision of responses customers get and help resolve the 10 per cent of enquiries the messaging platform cannot currently answer.”
CBA is introducing Gen AI-enhanced messaging to support the “needs of its business customers.”
The messaging service will help tens of thousands of business customers make payments faster, transact with confidence, and “save time and effort, as the chatbot serves up immediate, real-time responses to enquiries.”
Loan applications and annual credit reviews are also being simplified and streamlined by AI, helping Australian small business customers “access capital faster.”
With loan applications, documents will reportedly be “pre-populated” using the customer’s own information.
The experience avoids rework, speeds up the application and review process, and can enable conditional “approval in less than 10 minutes.”
For annual reviews, the introduction of AI is expected to “reduce the exercise from around 14 hours to two hours.”
As mentioned in the announcement, they aim to safely manage the rollout of customer facing Gen AI, which is why CBA has implemented 11 guardrails to protect its models from risks “related to malicious inputs and misleading outputs.”
The Bank, which purchased the equivalent of 100 per cent renewable electricity for its Australian operations, including its Australian data centres, sources AI computing capacity from third party providers.
A number of CBA’s computing capacity providers have “made commitments to source renewable or low emissions energy.”
CBA claims that it has a “longstanding” AI governance framework.
