CBA uplifts GenAI integrations

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia is advancing its generative AI work via its customer engagement engine (CEE) to enable “hyper personalisation” for mobile banking users.

Speaking at the CBA's South Eveleigh office in Sydney, group chief information officer Gavin Munroe said the bank has a long history of utilising artificial intelligence.

Over the year, the bank has “converted” its CBA AI platform to include generative AI, according to Munroe, as well as discussed CommBank Customer Copilot plans.

At a 'reimagining banking' themed presentation, Munroe said CBA has now “integrated 100-plus large language models and small language models” into the bank's AI platform.

“We've made sure we've integrated proprietary, as well as open-sourced models," he said.

"Why we've done this [is because] the space is changing so fast [that] we wanted to make sure we're not locked into a specific product provider.

“We want to make sure we can leverage the fast-changing environment in this GenAI space. So we’ve got open source models and GenAI models.”

Munroe said that GenAI is being used to augment the personalisation capabilities of the existing customer engagement engine, which was made in 2016 so the bank could have the most contextually relevant "conversation" with a customer each time they logged in.

He said the bank “can proudly say we've actually upgraded to include GenAI” in shaping the customer experience.

“When you log on to the app… its customised for me, with GenAI determining the best screen to show you every time you come back," Munroe said.

“The idea is that as your experience with the bank evolves, we've got to be able to make that relevant for you."

“More importantly”, he added “we're going to put more and more capabilities into the mobile app and more and more complexity.”

“We can’t just dump it in there and leave it up to you to figure out how to navigate. The idea is we can personalise it based on your experience, based on your journey and based on what you're interested in today.”

Earlier this year, CBA's chief data and analytics officer Dr Andrew McMullan spoke about the banks ambitions to increase levels of personalisation and engagement via "different experiences in the app.”

Other areas of "reimagination"

The bank's presentations also covered several non-generative AI focused initiatives as well.

During the talk, Munroe touched on the bank's anti-scam and fraud work, including its NameCheck feature and CallerCheck verification.

“Since those launches, we've saved the customers $200 million in scams," he said.

NameCheck is now being offered to other institutions, with Bendigo Bank recently signing up to a pilot in its subsidiary Up’s banking app.

Elsewhere, CBA’s executive general manager of digital and customer Meg Bonighton provided an update on the bank’s recent CommBank App v5, which integrates CommSec trading capabilities.

Bonighton said there’s now “300,000 more customers engaged with the app. That's about a million more customers since this time last year”.

She credited several years of investment into money management tools "including budget planners, bill prediction capabilities and 'smart savings'" for some of that growth.

“We have over 150 features within the app so we're very feature rich, but sometimes it's difficult to find all of those features as well," Bonighton said.

The app offers "universal search" capabilities today, along with what CBA terms “dynamic navigation".

“You've got a set of app tiles that sit in the middle of the screen. Essentially, those are personalised. They are dynamic, they will change based on your interaction with the app," Bonighton said.

'Book a lender’, travel insurance, and credit features are now seeing “up to two times more discoverability” then before, she said. 

“Coming soon” the bank will move into the travel space via its partnership with Hopper that will allow customers plan, book and manage travel finances within the CommBank app.

CommBank Yello

CBA’s latest AI-driven customer recognition program, CommBank Yello now has 8 million customers enrolled to received personalised benefits.

Since launching last year, the bank has now recorded 1.5 million visits from customers, sent out 55 million offers and given out $2.4 million in cashbacks to homeowner customers.

It also recorded 29,000 offers activated on the recent Black Friday sales.

Group executive retail banking Angus Sullivan said that “the heart of what we're trying to achieve is to build greater transactional and through that digital engagement primarily in our transacting customer base”.

Business Banking and real estate developments

Its business banking division made two new announcements during the update.

CBA has introduced Smart Real Estate Payments, which is a real estate payments solution to reduce administrative load and improve customer experience when making, collecting and reconciling rental payments.

Group executive for business banking Michael Vacy-Lyle said the bank is in pilot at the moment with plans to launch “in the first quarter of 2024.”

CBA also said it has kicked off collaboration within the agriculture sector via the winners of x15 Xccelerate startup program, Pairtree Intelligence.

Pairtree Intelligence is said to be able to connect farmers to 100-plus AgTech companies and bring together data from once incompatible digital sources, to aggregate insights.

“There are multiple sources of data out there. It's a very fragmented disaggregated space,” Vacy-Lyle said.

He said the partnership will see Pairtree and the bank “aggregate this very fragmented data, put it into usable, understandable and clearly understandable [formats] … back to our agricultural customers, and in turn use those insights ourselves to better discover risk and design products into the future”.

He said the bank has “a strong focus around investing into our regional capabilities to help farmers in Australia”.