While brewing the morning coffee, jogging along the river, or right before stepping in your car. You can now complete a transfer or payment, or manage your account’s health without losing sight of your routine, or filling out the tedious list of numbers of a transaction form. BBVA Data & Analytics has developed a new engine for BBVA Bancomer in Mexico that can predict when and what kind of transfer or payment you are going to repeat. When users enter their digital bank account, this engine can guess successfully what are you there for and offer you a shortcut to complete the task.
Instead of having to fill out an information form each time you want to complete a transaction, “One Click”, a new tool available now to Mexican customers, allows you to choose among a set of recommended transactions to keep your account up-to-date.
“We have developed the first recommendation engine for retail financial transactions. Think of it as the carousel you see in Netflix when they recommend you movies, but instead with a list of recurring payments and transactions updated in almost real-time”, explains Christhian Jonathan Flores, BBVA Data & Analytics’ Data Scientist in Mexico City.
The new tool makes sense of all the digital channels a person uses to interact with their account (mobile, desktop, and ATMs). The data gathered draws a very detailed picture of the transaction completed by a client up to 8 months back in time and extracts insights about the frequency, the amount and the concept of a transaction.
This application responds to the specifics of the financial culture in México, a country where not many people have their accounts associated with direct withdrawals to avoid the consequences of phishing or invoicing errors. That is why every week, every other week, every month, or who knows with what frequency bills need to be paid, transfers between accounts have to be satisfied so things keep running as usual. “One Click” can pick on this apparent random frequent transactions an recommend them once they need to be repeated.
The team behind “One Click” is able to identify recurrent transactions with high accuracy and go even further. The model can recommend a range for the amount of that transaction, so the customer can reduce its modifications to the very minimum. The tool also uses Natural Language Processing techniques to identify the type of transaction, categorize them and personalize the questions about how to process the recurrent transaction. “Do you want to pay for summer camp today?” is one of the questions that a customer can receive in order to complete a transaction.
Customers who have used “One Click” are greatly impressed with the ability of this AI toolset to predict their needs, giving this recommendation engine almost a 10 out of 10 in usefulness. The next steps will improve the interactivity with the client to make it simpler to authorized a recurring payment.
This tool is part of the push by BBVA to personalize the customer experience in the digital channels. “One Click” is a step towards a most intuitive, human, and personal interaction with each customer. The future of banking will be defined by companies that can offer a meaningful answer a financial question and who will eventually help you to reach your life goals without worrying about taking the wrong financial decision along the way.