– Customers are looking for more and more innovative solutions and services in the area of financial management – they should be simple to use, facilitate everyday life, but also help to save their time. By introducing new conveniences and expanding our offer, as in the case of the Voice Assistant in IKO, we want to build a positive experience among customers and be, above all, a partner supporting them in various situations every day – says Katarzyna Dziwulska, Director of Strategy and Digital Transformation Division at PKO Bank Polski.
Since September last year, using the Voice Assistant in IKO, the customers can check how much they spend on credit commitments, card payments, transfers or ATM withdrawals.
– Now this feature has been extended, so customers can analyze their card payments even more precisely – all they have to do is ask how much they spent in a specific period of time, for example, over the last 6 months at a given merchant. The customer can see the spending at each merchant where they have paid with their card. This is a very useful solution nowadays, which helps manage the household budget and facilitate the planning of future expenses – stresses Dawid Kin, Director of Artificial Intelligence Development Office in PKO Bank Polski.
Carrying out such an analysis of expenses is very simple – in order to see a summary it is enough to ask the Assistant “how much did I spend on station X in the last year?” or write “show expenses in Y in the last 3 months”. The IKO user has to provide the Assistant with the name or brand of: a retail chain, confectionery, gas station, restaurant or other retailer. He can do it in one sentence or start with a simple “how much do I spend” and answer the Assistant’s questions. The analysis currently takes into account expenses made with payment cards (debit and credit) and excludes transfers made from the account and payments in foreign currency.
In future it will be possible to analyse with the IKO Voice Assistant categories and subcategories of expenses, i.e. check and compare how much money the user spent e.g. on fuel, groceries or clothes. The bank is also planning to extend this function with other types of transactions, e.g.: transfers, possibility to see a full, detailed list of operations from a given store, as well as analysis and comparison of expenses at several sellers.
The voice assistant in IKO has been available to the users of PKO Bank Polski mobile application for over one and a half years. Since its launch it has already carried out over 1.4 million conversations with customers, currently it is about 90 thousand dialogues a month. It has also recorded more than 2.8 million user contributions. At the beginning it understood more than 70 topics of conversations, now there are more than 300 and it will gradually increase. The Assistant already has more than half a million unique users. Since September 2021, the Voice Assistant in IKO allows you to use tools for analysis and management of personal finances. The first function allows you to check how much you spend on: credit commitments, card payments, outgoing transfers, ATM withdrawals and other payments. The second informs you about the state of your savings on your account. Both allow you to select the currency, account and period (current month, previous month, last 3 months, last 6 months and last year) for which the analysis is to be performed. The amounts of expenses and savings are presented graphically – in the form of charts (bars) and a summary, which the Voice Assistant provides in spoken and text form.
With the help of the Assistant, apart from the analysis of the expenses and savings, it is possible, among others, to make a regular transfer to a defined beneficiary or to the account number, make a transfer to the phone, check the account balance, search the account history, top up the phone, pay with BLIK, pay off the credit card or change the transaction limits on the card. The functions supported by the assistant will gradually increase. The system is still learning and if it cannot perform something at the moment it will move the user to a place in IKO where he will perform the banking operation on his own. It understands natural language and does not impose the way of communication, e.g. when ordering a transfer you can say “transfer to…” but also “push the cash register”. , but also “push the money to…”.
The Assistant was launched on a pilot basis at the end of May 2020. All IKO users, using both Android and iOS smartphones, can use voicebot from the beginning of August 2020. IKO users do not need to install the Assistant – just click on the animated dialogue cloud icon in the top right corner of the app’s home screen.
