Avaloq and Personetics are entering into a strategic partnership to connect Avaloq's global banking clients with Personetic's AI-powered personalized engagement solutions. Personetics, a global provider of data-driven and personalized engagement solutions for bank customers, is joining the Avaloq.one This partnership gives Avaloq's banking clients access to Personetics Engage, a business solution that offers deep analysis of customers' financial data in real-time, understands their financial behaviour, anticipates their needs and acts accordingly on their behalf. Personetics Engage provides data-driven day-to-day personalized insights, financial advice and wellness programmes, tailored to mass market, affluent as well as small business customers. Personetics Engage is supported by a rich set of tools used to help banks create Personalization IP for market differentiation while delivering significant business impact.

There is a growing number of banks on the road to Self-Driving Finance, with more banks all over the world realizing that helping customers manage their money is a critical to keeping the banking relevant. Personalized insights drive engagement and trust: banks that make them part of the customer's everyday digital banking experience are seeing substantial increase in mobile and online engagement and high satisfaction levels with the insights delivered. Bank customers expect and embrace personalized advice and automated functions to help them save more, reduce their debt, and invest towards long-term goals. We're just at the beginning of the road with automation, but early results are promising and the potential for real impact on customers' financial wellbeing is great. Self-Driving Finance is not only for consumers – small businesses have significant needs for simplified day-to-day banking, forward-looking cashflow management, and prescriptive advice to ensure liquidity and support future growth.

Personetics is the leading provider of customer-facing AI solutions for financial services and the company behind the industry's first Self-Driving Finance platform. Harnessing the power of AI, Personetics' Self-Driving Finance solutions are used by the world's largest financial institutions to transform digital banking into the center of the customer's financial life – providing real-time personalized insight and advice, automating financial decisions, and simplifying day-to-day money management. Serving over 65 million bank customers worldwide, Personetics has the largest direct customer impact of any AI solution provider in banking today. Personetics customers include 6 of the top 12 banks in North America and Europe and other leading banks throughout the world. Led by a team of seasoned FinTech entrepreneurs with a proven track record, Personetics is a rapidly growing company with offices in New York, London, Paris, Singapore, and Tel Aviv.

The bank's mobile app will offer customers personalized insights and recommendations based on their spending habits... But the heart of it is about keeping customers engaged - a "lifetime benefit driver." The move is the latest among U.K. challenger banks to'own' the PFM space, adding pressure on incumbents to innovate.

Just like self-driving cars, Self-Driving Finance is not an all or nothing proposition but rather a continuum of capabilities. It enables banks to provide retail, small business and wealth management customers with varying degrees of guidance in managing their finances – ranging from real-time insights to personalized recommendations and automated money management.

While many companies struggle to figure out what to do with AI, a few are emerging as leaders in deploying it, with only a handful succeeding in incorporating AI in the sensitive area of customer relations. The Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) and Israel Discount Bank, using an AI platform from Personetics, are premier examples of how to do AI right, right now. RBC is focusing its use of AI on "solving real customer problems--and the number one source of anxiety for Canadians is managing their finances," says RBC's Peter Tilton, Senior Vice President, Digital. "In finance, like in any other field, people want and expect faster, easier, more accessible and proactive service," says Arik Frishman, EVP and head of the digital and data division at Discount Bank. "AI is the main enabler for all of these," he adds.

Digital challenger bank Tandem has turned to Personetics' artificial intelligence (AI) for personalised insights and advice. Powered by Personetics' Cognitive Banking Brain, the bank will integrate the new offerings within its digital banking. Tandem's chief executive, Ricky Knox says: "Together with our use of open banking we can use AI to get to know our customers better, predict their needs, and help them make better decisions about their money with as little effort as possible on their part. We want to do the heavy lifting for them, so they can go about their lives and not worry about day-to-day finances." Examples of personalised insights delivered by the Personetics solution include unusual spending activity; tips on how to avoid fees; and opportunities for savings or investment. Knox adds: "While AI is promising, it was important for us to work with a partner such as Personetics that has proven experience in financial services.

In mining terms, banks sit on the Mother Lode of data, with multiple kinds of "ore" to be refined. For example, there are the huge amounts of raw data in the background of customer relationships with their banks--account balances and history and more. But there are also behavioral and transactional data that define customers. For example, when and where you use Uber, and how often, can tell multiple stories. The trick is sifting out the nuggets from the noise, according to Eran Livneh, vice-president, marketing, for Personetics.

Finance, a traditionally risk-averse sector, is ahead of most industries, at least when it comes to using robots for customer interaction. Bank bots will soon be managing accounts, reminding users to pay bills, and giving advice on loans and investments. Banks have already dabbled in introducing automated customer service, especially for fairly predictable requests. Mobile banking via SMS started in 2003, enabling functions such as moving money around your own accounts or checking your balance and transaction history. But text prompts were often unwieldy, far from what a normal conversation should sound like, unless you communicate in code when speaking to your tellers.

A survey by Personetics shows that the financial services industry is getting a closer to supporting conversational commerce, supporting projects that use chatbots to improve the overall customer experience. Research reveals that most banking providers will be using automated chatbots to handle a significant volume of customer conversations in the near future. Some are doing it already. Powered by chatbots, conversational commerce (Voice-First Banking) allows organizations to interact with customers over digital and messaging platforms, providing answers to questions, advice and offers in real-time. A survey conducted by Personetics shows that over three quarters of financial institution respondents view chatbots as a viable commercial solution now or within the next 1-2 years, and almost half of the companies already have active chatbot projects in place. A majority of the respondents see a substantial share of customer conversations handled by bots within 3-5 years.