P&N Bank expands use of AI in Salesforce ecosystem

Police & Nurses (P&N) Bank is expanding its use of artificial intelligence to create better employee and member-facing experiences.

The bank is closely observing the trend towards augmenting systems with AI, and is using some AI-based capabilities from Salesforce, senior manager for CRM solutions Syed J. Ahmed told Salesforce's Dreamforce 2023 conference in San Francisco.

Ahmed highlighted several Salesforce Einstein services that P&N Bank has started using, including Einstein Activity Capture and Einstein Send Time Optimisation.

Einstein is the umbrella brand for AI-based services that are designed to augment an existing Salesforce platform.

Activity Capture is being used to synchronise calendars to allow members of the bank to book time with a mobile lender.

"We have started using Einstein Activity Capture for mobile lenders, that syncs their calendars from Outlook to their Salesforce calendars," Ahmed said.

"It helps the members to book appointments and send emails in real-time to the member from the mobile lender as well."

Send Time Optimisation, meanwhile, is a "tool that learns the pattern of the ... member in the backend, and it only sends you an email when it is the right time that you will open the email and you will be reading the email."

"So it has increased our click rate and open rate," Ahmed said.

The bank is further eyeing some of the emerging generative AI capabilities being brought into the Salesforce ecosystem, a key one being 'Prompt Builder', a tool the vendor hopes will get Salesforce admins using generative AI to interact with their Salesforce orgs.

The tool is soon entering a closed, paid pilot; P&N Bank did not publicly commit to being part of that process, but Ahmed suggested he saw value in what it brought to the table.

"In P&N [Bank], we are constantly doing enhancements ... as part of our transformation project," he said.

He saw potential use cases around training, making it easier to point out changes or feature additions being made to the Salesforce environment, and encouraging their usage.

P&N Bank is traditionally based in Western Australia where it has 14 branches and a Perth-based contact centre, though it added East Coast operations in 2019 by merging with BCU Bank.

It is building a sizeable Salesforce ecosystem, under the brand ‘P&N Bank 360’: platforms in use include Financial Services Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Marketing Cloud Intelligence and MuleSoft.

It is also using a suite of Salesforce tools to guard memer data held in Salesforce's cloud, including Salesforce Shield for data monitoring and end-to-end encryption, and Data Mask in sandbox environments, which are typically used for testing purposes.

"In the old days we had to do data masking ourselves, but now we can use this batch process to depersonalise data in our full copy sandbox and partial copy sandbox so that when you're given access, it's already personalised to developers," Ahmed said.

In addition, P&N Bank is applying Mobile Application Security to ensure that an app used by mobile lenders interacts with members' personally-identifiable information (PII) securely and safely so "that the data cannot be copied over or cannot be sent through messages."

The app had helped “increase productivity” for lenders as “they do not have to scroll or have open to multiple screens to just give us status to a customer.”

It also means mobile lenders can rely on their smart devices and avoid needing to “have to go and open their laptop”.

Kate Weber attended Dreamforce 2023 in San Francisco as a guest of Salesforce.