CUs Add Intelligence to Digital Assistants & Business Applications

A roundup of some fintech activity includes credit unions from Washington with a new artificial intelligence powered digital assistant, Pennsylvania providing business intelligence, and Michigan running a business continuity scenario.

The $3.6 billion, Richland, Wash.-based Gesa Credit Union launched Uni, its AI-based search experience for members. The intelligence-powered digital assistant, Uni, powered by a tech company called “interface,” combines language, knowledge graph, business logic and response models to help enterprises create and maintain an intelligent virtual assistant.

Following a recent merger, Gesa’s portfolio of products and services more than doubled. This made finding products and services on the website challenging for both members and prospects.

Raj Bandaru, the chief information officer/chief information security officer/COO, said, “Uni, the new digital assistant, has enabled us to offer an Amazon-like search experience to our members and prospects. Uni immediately increases the discoverability and adoption of our offerings while ensuring that our members get a rich and personalized experience.”

In the initial phase, Uni is helping members find information on the website instantly. In the next phase, Uni will expand to transactional insights, goal-setting, reminders and also to recommend the right products and services. In the future, Gesa expects Uni to also power Gesa’s contact center.

“The collective knowledge interface has derived from processing millions of conversations, has been made available to Gesa from Day 1,” Srinivas Njay, the founder/CEO of interface, which has offices in the Silicon Valleys of India and California, said. He added, “This has enabled Gesa to make Uni available to members immediately and provide exceptional member experience from the get-go. Uni will continue to learn and improve with every interaction.”

The New York City-based Information Builders, which provides business intelligence announced that the $5.6 billion, Harrisburg, Penn.-based Pennsylvania State Employees Credit Union selected its data and analytics platform to extend self-service decision-making capabilities to hundreds of employees.

According to Robert Burger, PSECU’s chief data officer, the organization selected Information Builders due to its superior data-visualization capabilities and strong data access, governance and mobile deployment capabilities – all of which empower employees to assist members with their information needs. PSECU already has a data warehouse, as well as tools for corporate reporting, but executives wanted to “get to the next level of maturity” with enterprise analytics as part of their overall digital initiatives focused on member experience and performance improvements.

Information Builders’ platform includes capabilities to support these goals, including dynamic portals and dashboards, visualizations, predictive models and automatic alerts. A responsive design provides new analytics easily consumed through the computers, tablets and mobile devices that employees choose to use for the best user experience.

“Information Builders not only has superior technology for data intelligence, but also a strong emphasis on data modeling, metadata and data governance,” Burger said. “We were looking for a complete analytics system, not just a tool, and Information Builders offered the most comprehensive platform. Their technology will help us achieve the analytics maturity we need and to use past data to predict future outcomes.”

In the first phase of the project, PSECU is using Information Builders’ Credit Union Accelerator to make it easy for business professionals to access trusted, business-ready data, without navigating the complexities of databases and data models. The Information Builders approach upholds PSECU’s philosophy of self-sufficiency: The IT team will serve as the data custodians, while the business community takes responsibility for analyzing and sharing data.

In phase two, PSECU will develop executive portals that present relevant key performance indicators and business measures. The credit union expects this dynamic environment will reveal banking metrics, liquidity positions and profitability trends, allowing executives to monitor daily changes in cash, loans, balances, margins, ratios and many other important measures of financial health and member stability.

PSECU’s technology roadmap includes using Information Builders’ predictive analytics technology to help members maintain their accounts in good standing. For example, they could create a predictive model that monitors loan repayment patterns. These insights will help the credit union identify potential delinquencies and prevent charge-offs. PSECU is also training more than a dozen employees to use Information Builders’ platform. These “power users” will be able to help their respective business create analytics apps without assistance from the IT department.

“Increasingly, credit unions compete against large, well-funded banks through streamlined, high-touch member services delivered digitally, efficiently and profitably,” Jon M. Deutsch, vice president and global head of financial services for Information Builders, said. “As an industry leader in that transformation, PSECU is using analytics to create a superior digital experience for its members.”

The $360 million Alpena Alcona Area Credit Union in Alpena, Mich., looked to take its business continuity program to the next level by including key vendors and service providers in recovery testing and exercises. The credit union partnered with the Grand Rapids, Mich.-based CU*Answers to conduct a disaster recovery tabletop exercise.

With the participation of business unit leaders and branch managers, the simulated scenario involved a severe winter storm resulting in power and data communications outages at select branch locations with conditional injects at 15-minute intervals. “Understanding the capacity of the credit union to continue serving our members as conditions change is instrumental in enabling us to ask the right questions, anticipate the needs and identify solutions in advance,” Angie Szatkowski, COO for Alpena Alcona Area, said. “By engaging our core processor, the team was exposed to a fresh perspective for preparing and responding to the situation, as well as leveraging online channels for reaching the members where they are, even during northern Michigan winter storms.”

Danielle Caliendo, business continuity coordinator, represented CU*Answers during the exercise. Caliendo oversees the program for the core processor but also assists network credit unions in building and testing programs of their own.