How artificial intelligence is changing the face of banking in India?

India is the second-largest country in terms of population in the world after China. The country's economy largely relies on robust financial infrastructure contributing to the growth of each sector in the nation. Since the financial industry is sufficiently capitalised and well-regulated, Indian banks are actively capitalizing on advanced technologies. No wonder artificial intelligence is leading the way into the country's financial institutions, spotting atypical human behaviour, lessening operational costs and improving efficiency. AI is already having a vital impact on human life, transforming everything from how we live and work.

With soaring customer expectations and with an aim of delivering a better customer experience, financial services providers are implementing AI technology into banking operations. Artificial intelligence has the potential to detect frauds, mitigate uncertain risks, and help manage regulatory compliance. This article will let you go through the top Indian banks that are using AI and how are they benefiting from it.

State Bank of India

State Bank of India (SBI) is the largest public sector banking services provider in the country. To deliver effective banking services, the bank capitalizes on artificial intelligence. SBI Intelligent Assistant (SIA), an AI-powered smart chat assistant, addresses customer enquiries instantly and helps them with everyday banking tasks like a human does. Developed by an AI banking platform Payjo, this smart chat assistant is equipped to handle nearly 10,000 enquiries per second or 864 million in a day, which is almost 25% of the queries are processed by Google each day, reports noted.

HDFC

Headquartered in Mumbai, HDFC is another Indian banking and financial services firm that uses AI. The bank's smart chatbot called 'Eva' works with Google Assistant on millions of Android devices to solve customers' queries and provides them with better services. Built by Bengaluru-based Senseforth AI Research, Eva has reportedly claimed to have answered over five million user queries with more than 85% accuracy. HDFC also has an AI-enabled chatbot, OnChat, which launched on Facebook Messenger in 2016.

ICICI

ICICI Bank, a leading private sector bank in India, has applied software robotics in over 200 business processes across diverse functions of the company. Through this, the bank became the first in the country to deploy an AI system at a large scale in various processes. According to the report, ICICI bank has scaled its RPA initiative to over 750 software robotics handling nearly 2 million transactions daily, which is 20% of the transaction volumes.

Axis

Axis bank allows its customers to talk about their banking issues anytime, anywhere through an AI-powered bot. India's third-largest private sector bank in July 2020 unveiled a conversational interactive voice response (IVR) system, called AXAA. As a next-generation multilingual voice bot, AXAA assists customers to traverse through the IVR and addresses their queries and requests, without the need for any human intervention in most cases. The private lender also has an innovation lab called 'Though Factory' that aimed to expedite the development of innovative AI technology solutions for the banking sector.

Bank of Baroda

Bank of Baroda is another public sector lender advancing banking services and reducing the cost of managing accounts while focusing on improving customer service through AI. The bank uses advanced gadgets like an artificial intelligence robot named Baroda Brainy and Digital Lab with free Wi-Fi services. It also has a chatbot named ADI (Assisted Digital Interaction). In 2018, Bank of Baroda partnered with IBM and Accenture to power a state-of-the-art IT Center of Excellence (ITCoE) and Analytics Center of Excellence (ACoE).

Andhra Bank

Andhra bank is a medium-sized public sector bank of India that merged with Union Bank of India in April 2020. As the bank has a network of branches, with numerous satellite offices in the country, it has adopted advanced technology. The bank uses an AI interactive assistant named "ABHi" to address customer queries immediately and effectively. This AI chatbot, developed by Floatbot, is integrated with Core Banking Servers (CBS) of Andhra Bank and will automate customer support for five crore account holders of the bank.

Kotak Mahindra Bank

Kotak Mahindra uses a smart AI-enabled chatbot to power millions of Kotak customers with quick and available to answer banking queries round the clock. The chatbot, named Keya, is a bilingual voicebot that comes integrated with Kotak's phone-banking helpline and will augment the traditional interactive voice response (IVR) system. The bank launched Keya 2.0 voicebot with new features in 2019.

The banking system in India far superior and well-regulated. As per the report, the asset of public sector banks stood at US$1.52 trillion in the fiscal year 2020. Furthermore, bank credit grew at a CAGR of 3.57% during FY16-FY20. As of FY2020, total credit extended reached US$ 1,698.97 billion. As the country's banking ecosystem is relentlessly growing, the adoption of artificial intelligence will continue to evolve, enabling a digital banking infrastructure.