Australian online bank UBank is set to debut the latest member of its home loan team, Mia, a digital assistant with a human face powered by artificial intelligence technology.
Operating day and night, Mia - short for My Interactive Agent - has been trained to answer more than 300 of the most common questions customers have about the home loan application process, complementing the chat with a range of gifs and animations.
UBank CEO Lee Hatton says: “By bringing Mia to life, we’re giving customers a whole new way to interact with their online home loan application and completely challenging the perception of a digital bank."
Developed in concert with local vendor FaceMe, Mia will complement UBank’s home loan chatbot, RoboChat, and Live Chats with human advisors, to help customers apply for a home loan.
Hatton says the bank's AI-driven projects have been well received by customers, with 4 in 5 saying they’re happy to use RoboChat. Launched in May 2017, Robochat is currently fielding an average of 86 queries per day and has answered more than 50,000 questions during its tenure.
“We want to continue attracting customers but maintaining the same number of team members to support this ever-growing customer base,” Hatton says. “That means we need to leverage key technologies like AI to tackle the typical questions customers ask, so we can free up our team to address the unique situations our customers need more support with, every day.”