Complaint management is a crucial aspect of customer service and risk management in the financial services sector.
These firms—including traditional banks, fintechs and insurance companies—must adhere to various regulations and standards that require them to handle complaints in a fair, expeditious and proper way. The consequences of failing to do so are high—in 2023, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) resolved six previously filed lawsuits through final orders, requiring a total payment for violations of approximately $3.07 billion to compensate consumers and approximately $498 million in civil money penalties.
To mitigate this problem, Spring Labs, the intelligent AI powerhouse solution for financial services, today announced Zanko ComplianceAssist. This new module builds upon the conversational intelligence capabilities of Spring Labs' Zanko CustomerAssist, an AI copilot for fintechs, to dramatically reduce the time compliance professionals spend analyzing customer complaints, in addition to identifying high-risk and often hidden issues, and to efficiently enable corrective actions.
"Complaints are often viewed as negative, but they are actually the gateway to understanding how your customers feel about their experience with you as a financial institution. With Zanko ComplianceAssist, we help unlock the power of complaints by using AI to provide more granular and actionable insights," says John Sun, CEO and Co-Founder of Spring Labs. "The benefits are much more than just cost savings. We hope to help our partners reduce regulatory risk, achieve better effective control over their fintech partners, and ultimately help the consumer be better heard when they speak to a financial institution."
"We're excited to be the first to partner with Spring Labs on a commercial application of AI which can benefit consumers and fintech partners alike. A crucial aspect of our business is providing quality oversight of complex and large-scale lending activities. Zanko ComplianceAssist helps our team identify insights and issues more quickly than we could on our own," says Derek Higginbotham, CEO, First Electronic Bank. "Beyond just compliance, First Electronic Bank is committed to being early movers in exploring new uses of technology to improve how we serve consumers."
"Complaints management is a critical component to an effective Compliance Management System and an important control over our fintech partner programs," says Nissen Liddiard, EVP Compliance Officer, Celtic Bank. "Spring Labs' Zanko ComplianceAssist product provides us with a useful tool to analyze complaint trends which allows us to better oversee our products and partners."
"Zanko ComplianceAssist helps us assess the root cause of complaints at least 80 percent more efficiently, enabling us to resolve potential issues much faster," says Jim Jackson, SVP Strategic Partner Oversight, WebBank. "This gives us greater peace of mind as we expand our channels for communicating with customers."
By using AI to catalog, categorize and organize customer complaints, compliance professionals can slash the time they spend analyzing complaints by up to 65 percent. ComplianceAssist delivers automated classification, tagging, Voice of Customer (VoC) profiling, and root cause analysis, and can screen 100 percent of customer conversations to escalate the highest-priority complaints like deceptive advertising and fair lending, which customers can escalate to regulators if they're not addressed properly and expeditiously.
"Ultimately, these advanced complaint analysis capabilities can help financial services firms scale their compliance processes to be more accurate, actionable, and effective," continues Sun. "Zanko ComplianceAssist can be a key element in a firm's growth plan, empowering compliance professionals with the invaluable tool they need to elevate their strategic contributions and role as 'superheroes' within their organizations."