Enrichment Federal Credit Union, a $456 million institution based in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, with 42,000 members and 9 offices, has become the first credit union to roll out the Financial Interaction Voice Experience (FIVE) banking skill.

BIG has certified the first Alexa skill specifically designed to allow credit union members to perform transaction-based functions, such as executing transfers between accounts, making loan payments, and accessing balances and account histories for checking, savings and loans, all using voice commands secured by a single sign on.

The transaction options available through BIG’s skill exceed any other financial institution skills available on Amazon’s skill store to date. While other skills allow customers to query for general information, such as loan rates or credit card balances, BIG’s FIVE skill enables users to access all of their credit union accounts, spanning checking and savings, car loans, mortgages, and credit cards. It also offers member engagement capabilities, including educational audio clips on critical topics such as security and financial literacy.

“We’ve been perfecting the user experience for months, understanding what members want to accomplish and how they speak about these activities,” explained BIG CEO and co-founder John Best. “BIG has created extensive libraries of phrases for the skill and made it easy for credit unions to add more phrases - all with the goal of customizing and optimizing the experience for members.”

In building Alexa Voice Service capabilities into its FIVE platform, BIG is centralizing many common commands enabling these features to more easily be extended to subsequent voice-first products. FIVE positions financial institutions to rapidly add new capabilities and additional voice services as technology evolves.

Growth in the number of skills available from Amazon for Alexa has been swift. In February 2017 Amazon announced that the number of skills had increased 300% to 10,000. By July 2017 it had grown to over 15,000 skills. But access to financial accounts is a sensitive area and only a handful of skills have been certified for these tasks. BIG is among a select group of companies to create an extensible skill specifically for financial institutions, which enables Alexa access for their clients. Enrichment FCU is the first credit union to deploy the FIVE skillset to its members.

“Artificial intelligence is the most promising new technology available. We are excited to be the first credit union to implement BIG’s Amazon Alexa skill, which will enable our members to complete financial transactions via artificial intelligence - making financial solutions easier,” said John Merritt, CIO of Enrichment. “It is as easy as ‘Alexa - transfer $100 from my checking account to my savings account’.”

“Our goal is to provide members with seamless banking transactions 24/7 worldwide,” said Craig Peters, Enrichment’s CEO. “We are proud to provide our members with a technologically convenient method of accessing their accounts, anytime and anywhere, while still providing a personal touch with a high level of account security.”