BMO is Canada’s oldest Bank and is currently fourth-largest bank in Canada by market capitalization and assets. The Bank has been investing a huge amount of $$ lately to stay ahead of its peers in online banking. The BMO announced the rollout of two new innovative chatbots for Facebook Messenger and Twitter, which provide instant responses to frequent customer inquiries. While many banks all around the world are pushing the use AI to tap the growing online market share, the use of Chatbots is a first by any Canadian major bank. Citibank has already launched the Chatbot service Singapore and plans to launch in Hong Kong and Australia later this year before moving onto other markets in which Citi operates.
Source: Citigroup
BMO’s Personal Banking Chatbot for Facebook Messenger: BMO has tied up with Finn AI and named this as BMO Bolt, a first-of-its-kind capability for a major bank in Canada and is designed to offer guidance and information to customers in real time. AI and natural language processing capabilities allow BMO Bolt to interpret customer intentions and provide the most relevant answers. Customers who register for the service can access information such as their account balances and credit card bill summaries by sending a message to the chatbot.
BMO’s Twitter Chatbot: This is an innovative Twitter Bot where Customers start in a traditional Twitter Direct Messaging experience, with the added option to engage with a BMO Virtual Assistant chatbot. BMO has developed this bot in partnership with Massively. The BMO Virtual Assistant is a menu-based question and answer chatbot for Twitter that helps customers find the information they need quickly and easily. Once a customer has chosen to engage the BMO Virtual Assistant, they are presented with a menu of available topics
The other big banks including TD, CNBC, Scotia and RBC and expected to follow the suit.
