Source: TechTrade Asia
Ravishankar, Co-founder and CEO, Active.Ai, observed that chat apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are a part of life for consumers in Singapore. “The rules of engagement are shifting,” he said. “The rules of engagement are unstructured. You write… as you speak, as you think. Customers are getting very used to that.”
Active.Ai works with financial institutions to provide domain expertise and brand personas for AI chatbots. The software-as-a-service makes conversational, AI-backed banking easily available to financial institutions so they can be more relevant to their audiences, he said. “You start doing and thinking things in a more natural way,” he said.
Ravishankar added that Active.Ai customers are focused on growing their customer base with Millennials, who have embraced new interaction methods.
“This generation lives on Snapchat, lives on Instagram. They want their bank, their purchasing experience to be very similar,” he said. “Just imagine, you are putting your bank into your WhatsApp. You have to grab the new customers. You can’t add 500 more branches.”
Ravishankar added that a scalable, AI-ready infrastructure that is performance-optimised – such as the AWS platform – is invaluable for financial institutions as they can test out what they really want to do. “They (can work) like startups – build very fast, test very fast and then come back and deploy very fast,” he said. “If you want to transform fast, this is the way to go.”
While the question of cloud security comes up often, especially with financial records, Walton shared that customers have done an about-face in recent years. “(Customers) have changed to say ‘the cloud is more secure than I can possibly be in my own data centre’, that they can’t invest in security at the scale that we can,” he said.
