Nordea Life and Pensions in Norway has welcomed its latest recruit, Nova, an AI-based chatbot that has been trained to respond to customer questions relating to pension and insurance in Norwegian.
Nova has been introduced initially to answer basic queries and refer customers on to human colleagues for more complex questions. Over time, however, the bot is expected to become more intuitive as it learns on the job, building more knowledge about how to interpret and respond to customers’ queries.
Ultimately, it is expected that Nova will will be able to guide customers to a secure environment with log-in, enabling them to perform tasks and/or obtain advice there.
"This is the beginning of a new era," says Nordea's group head of robotics strategy and innovation, Mattias Fras. "I foresee that AI - artificial intelligence, on which Nova is built - will be the new user interface. I also believe that the new ways of doing banking, in different parts of the eco-system, will require us to be wherever the customer is. Nova might be one of the ways we make that happen."
Nova is not the first robotic staffer introduced by the bank. 'Virtual colleagues' are already at work in several areas of the business, says Fras. Among them is Liv, at life and pensions, who has brought 80% faster process lead times, a 100% reduction in errors, and helped boost compliance, he says.