AI enabled YES ROBOT has booked 12 bn deposits within an year

What are the core guiding principles that you have learnt about AI over these years?
From India market perspective, over the past three-four years, AI has evolved from being a nascent phenomenon to becoming a credible strategic tool for addressing business problems. We will witness more action in next six months compared to the last couple of years. This is primarily because a larger ecosystem, outside of traditional banking and financial services is leveraging AI and bots as a service, and creating a lot of value-additions. Besides industry trends, every organisation should have a clear vision of what they want to achieve using AI solution, with some degree of creativity and innovative approach. One needs to use the platform to their advantage. The winning strategies employed by banks that are undergoing an AI-enabled transformation reveal how to best capture the opportunity. These strategies highlight the need for a holistic AI strategy that extends across banks’ business lines, usable data, partnerships with external partners, and qualified employees.

What kind of AI solutions are being used by YES Bank?
During our AI journey of over three years, YES Bank has experimented with and experienced the entire gamut of AI solutions. From simple pre-defined FAQ knowledge database creation for our enterprise YES Bot to a far more sophisticated Microsoft LUIS NLP and cognitive services enabled YES ROBOT for our customers, we are now doing POC for more complex use cases. Certain repeat transactions such as monthly rent payment, utility bill payments and mobile recharges can be entirely automated with limited or no human intervention. These scenarios unlock the true potential of AI banking
of future.

What kind of questions should be asked to vendors when buying AI solutions / tools?
Sophistication of the machine learning tool and robust AI model training using quality data are key parameters to gauge the effectiveness and relevance of any AI solution to the business problem at hand. Next comes the augmentation of core AI engine with ancillary services such as Natural Language Progression (NLP), facial recognition, speech to text, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and so on. Vendors should be comprehensively evaluated for core AI features, complementary services and integration with other external applications for holistic AI solution. Specific to BFSI domain, vendors should also be assessed with respect to data security, privacy, compliance, data storage and adherence to regulatory guidelines.

What are your views on having a robust supportive IT infrastructure for AI, for example, the required amount of data integrity and consolidation / data lake or warehouse, etc?
It is critical to have a computationally robust IT infrastructure in place to support huge and varied data pool for advanced analytics, machine learning and deep learning activities for AI based projects. YES Bank effectively leverages its private cloud infrastructure to address such demanding requirements. Consequently, our systems are flexible and scalable enough to handle applications which have an elastic workload such as statement printing. At the same time, our platform is capable and future-ready for leveraging any cognitive and bespoke service which suits our requirement and best fit for the use case in hand.

What kind of AI roadmap have you set for AI at YES Bank?
Our flagship AI powered chatbot – YES ROBOT – is a comprehensive, secure, 24*7 Personal Banking Assistant for customers and is currently available on our website and Facebook Messenger. Almost three years ago, YES Bank understood the importance of AI in banking and made it an integral part of the bank’s digital transformation journey. With several industry first initiatives launched on YES ROBOT, we have witnessed tremendous acceptance from our customers with total interactions reaching to a cumulative of 11 million as of today. We introduced various services such as booking of deposits with just an OTP for both domestic and NRI customers, managing nominee, instant application for 65+ banking products with CRM integration and many more to ensure utmost convenience to our customers at their home without need to visit a branch or call up a human for assistance.

Currently, we are working on powering more customer touch points such as phone banking and customer care support with our core AI engine. In the near future, we would be extending AI bot services to additional channels/applications such as Whatsapp, IVR and to IoT interfaces like Alexa and Google assistant.

Benefits from AI at YES Bank?
The adoption rate and feedback towards our flagship AI chatbot, YES ROBOT has been encouraging especially with the launch of Industry first feature of booking FD/RD using AI channel. A total of `12 billion worth deposits are already booked using YES ROBOT within a year of enabling this feature and has become the most preferred digital channel for booking deposits. With recent addition of nominee management feature, the entire deposits booking service is now paperless. It has helped the bank enhance its customer service by reducing the time-of-first-response to just a few seconds. The chatbot is witnessing over a million interactions per month responding to approx. 5.3 lakh customer queries last month. Benefits are immense, it empowers users to get their basic banking queries and requests addressed anytime anywhere. Also, it allows our branch staff to be effective in addressing more complex customer requirements.

YES Bank has a dedicated budget for AI. Please share how is the allocation done and what themes have been picked up for this year?
The bank has done significant investments in the futuristic skillsets of AI and ML to leverage enterprise data and derive key customer insights using AI/ML models for superior customer experiences. We are working on truly cutting edge AI and NLP technologies to revolutionise chat and voice bots for offering industry first innovative experience. AI projects drive value across the business, especially in customer service, cost optimisation and revenue generation. Projects promising maximum and quickest RoI are prioritised for execution.