---

Of all the award categories in the Banking Innovation Awards run jointly by Accenture and Efma*, the prize for “Best Use of Analytics and Artificial Intelligence” is one of the most coveted.  

It’s a status that reflects the maturity of this area of industry innovation. As more and more banks worldwide strive to become data-driven organizations, a core focus of their digital transformation programs is leveraging analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) at scale.  

Increasingly, these efforts include setting up centers of excellence dedicated to analytics, launching initiatives to monetize data, and developing AI solutions to enable new support and advisory services.  

So, amid this dynamic environment, who secured first place for AI and analytics innovation in 2019? The winner was CaixaBank of Spain with its chatbot Neo – a personal customer service assistant developed using AI, and now providing support 24×7 across various business processes in Spanish, Catalan and English. 

The launch and enthusiastic customer take-up of Neo reflect the rapid evolution of the mobile channel as a point of dialogue between banks and their customers. The Neo app is designed to be used for consultations as well as for managing operations – balance enquiries, monthly expenses and so on – while also helping to boost sales.  

The statistics about Neo underline both its technological sophistication and commercial success. Neo’s cognitive system accepts more than 60,000 inputs, enabling it to cover all types of conversation and all of the company’s products and services. Between its launch in February 2018 and the awards in October 2019, more than 2.5 million customers had conducted 23 million conversations with Neo, with 85% of queries settled without further engagement and a 20% reduction in calls to the contact centre. The result? Happier customers at lower cost. 

The Silver award in this category went to Akbank of Turkey for its Robotic Process Automation (RPA) tool, while Bronze was awarded to Isbank, also from Turkey, for its Maxi personal assistant. 

In my next post I’ll look at the second of the Banking Innovation Awards for Digital Marketing and Communication. Watch this space.

*Efma is now known as Qorus effective 16 June 2022. The Efma-Accenture Banking Innovation Awards are now known as the Qorus-Accenture Banking Innovation Awards: https://www.accenture.com/us-en/about/events/qorus-accenture-banking-innovation-awards