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It is designed to answer questions not only about banking services, but also about the weather or recipes.
Česká spořitelna has launched a pilot operation of the Hey, George feature. It is currently available in the banking application to approximately one hundred thousand people. It should be expanded to all retail clients this year.
The “digital advisor” serves as a guide to the products and services offered by the savings bank, while also working with the client’s data to provide personalized advice and recommendations. The bank believes that the Hey, George feature will help clients improve their financial health.
“Our ambition is to develop the best virtual advisor on the market, which, thanks to its knowledge of client data, will be able to provide personalized financial advice at the same level as a real banker,” says Michal Kraus, who is in charge of the development of Hey, George.
The conversational assistant using the ChatGPT4 tool is supposed to answer people’s questions, for example, about how they can block a payment card, how to set up permanent payments, how to pay using a QR code, what the interest rate is on a savings account, or how the client spent in the last six months.
“Can’t remember your PIN, or do you want to find out if dinner with friends at a better restaurant will strain your budget? I’m here for you, just ask me,” George encourages in the mobile application. And he adds other tips for specific questions, such as: How much did I spend on groceries? How to start saving for retirement? I lost my card. What are the key milestones in the history of Česká spořitelna?
“The development is taking place in collaboration with a model from OpenAI, which works with the latest artificial intelligence technologies to provide fast and accurate answers to questions,” Kraus explains.
The savings bank has been testing the new service since the end of the year with randomly selected clients, and their number is gradually increasing. “We want to find out how you and George talk, what suits you and what doesn’t. Thanks to this, we will be able to gradually improve it,” he writes to them. “I will try to answer you as best as I can. However, I am constantly learning, so please take me with a grain of salt,” says George himself.
All clients in the savings bank’s app of the same name have been able to write to a chatbot named George for a long time. Until now, however, he was more hidden in the chat, not actively appearing on the app’s homepage. At the same time, he is now smarter and more versatile than before. People will know at first glance that they now have the improved feature: in the lower right corner of the app, they will see a Hey bubble with stars, which they can click on to try out the new options.
“The previous chat was built on a rule-based principle. This means predefined scenarios combined with NLP (Natural Language Processing), which allows for gradual training of the model so that it understands and comprehends that, for example, payment and transaction are the same,” explains head of development Michal Kraus.
In contrast, the new Hey, George advisor is built from the ground up on LLM, a computer language model based on a neural network with many parameters, according to Kraus. “The huge advantage is understanding the client. With old chats, the transfer rate to a live person from the client center was up to 25 percent, with Hey George it’s only two percent – and that’s often because the client requests it themselves,” he says.
What else can Hey George do? According to Kraus, it can be divided into four categories:
- Feature Knowledge. It will help users discover all the features available in George. It currently has about 80 percent coverage of this category.
- Product Knowledge. Offers help with orientation in individual products and answers questions related to them. Currently, this knowledge is approximately 90 percent.
- Live Data. Provides personalized information about client products and works with “live data.” Currently, the ability to provide live data is in its infancy, with minimal coverage.
- ChitChat. With Hey, George, the client can chat about a variety of topics and ask questions about, for example, the weather, sporting events, entertainment, animals, travel, housing, music, art, jobs, technology, shopping, fashion, health, books, movies, politics, fun topics, “small talk” and more.
“The virtual assistant can also handle more casual conversations. For example, it can describe a recipe for spaghetti carbonara, provide advice on financial health, or provide information about the Erste Group,” adds Kraus.
The Hey, George project is being developed by the entire Erste Group, which also includes Česká spořitelna. It will gradually be used by banks from all countries in which Erste operates. The central team preparing the project is based in Prague, not Vienna. “The savings bank is then building a knowledge base for AI, modifying the local API and creating proactive scenarios,” Kraus specifies.
Some other banks are also trying out virtual assistants. So far, ČSOB is the one that is most prominently promoting it to its clients under the name Kate. Air Bank has an assistant named Aneta. At Raiffeisenbank, she is called RAIA, and she is currently available in chat without significant promotion. For example, Moneta deployed a voicebot named Tom in its call center the year before last.
