What Customers Want: The AI Concierge Revolution & What’s Next for Fintech CX

Welcome back to the grand finale of What Customers Want, a limited 4-part series from the Fintech Takes podcast, hosted by me and Corey Besaw, President of APAC and co-founder of Ubiquity.

In Episode 4, Corey and I are joined by Aditi Shekar and Mike Forsyth at Zeta, a company that’s building a "multiplayer" financial experience for families, offering adaptable joint banking. Their mission, in other words? Exceptional customer service.

We’ve added complexity with each episode, but this time we're diving into the juiciest layer of all: how AI, especially generative AI, is reshaping customer experience and where it’s headed next.

Highlights include:

• Exploring Zeta’s concierge model—a compelling blend of generative AI and human support that dials down customer anxiety. Gone are the frustrating “We’re closed until Monday” moments! Here, AI serves not only as a stand-in, but as your savvy financial coach, ready to unravel transaction data and fine-tune your spending strategy.

• By leveraging generative AI like ChatGPT, fintechs such as Zeta can handle 30-40% of basic inquiries, freeing human agents to tackle more complex issues. But this balancing act brings challenges; compliance and security are crucial in financial services. How do we find the right mix between constant availability and necessary filtering?

• The pivotal role data infrastructure plays in this equation. While LLMs excel in the “last mile” of communication, they rely on robust systems for accuracy. Given the exorbitant computational costs of snapshotting an insane number data points per customer, how can organizations ensure effective AI deployment?

• Imagining a future with micro-models that tailor interactions to individual behaviors. Can AI juggle basic requests while knowing when to tap a human agent? Will generative AI step up as your personal financial coach, or will we hit a plateau like the one Tesla faced with its self-driving promises—remember 2015, when they said fully autonomous cars would hit in...two years?

In short, early AI models were a chaotic free-for-all, drawing from the wild west of the internet. Now, we're refining that data for smarter models, but AGI remains an open question.

What's clear is that with innovations like GPT driving the bus, fintech is poised for explosive growth. In customer support, cutting-edge tech could be the silver bullet that transforms how customers get what they want in financial services.

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