HBL: Banking Chatbot
Habib Bank Limited is a Pakistani multinational bank based in Karachi, Pakistan. It is owned by Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development and is the largest bank by assets in Pakistan.
Founded in 1941, HBL became Pakistan’s first commercial bank. In 1951 it opened its first international branch in Colombo, Sri Lanka. In 1972 the bank moved its headquarters to the Habib Bank Plaza, which became the tallest building in South Asia at the time. The Government nationalized the bank in 1974 and privatized it in 2003; at that time the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development acquired a controlling share.
As of 2018, HBL has more than 1700 branches with presence in over 25 countries spanning across four continents. It is the largest company in Pakistan in terms of assets, and has repeatedly ranked top Pakistani company in the Forbes Global 2000.
The Challenge:
HBL’s Marketing team felt that they were in the need of an AI based Chatbot to further improve and augment the banking customer’s overall user experience.
HBL started looking for technologies that provided chatbot platforms and chose IBM Watson to develop a chatbot for HR and customer services. However, AI solution providers were not able to further guide HBL about how to implement and use the platform effectively once HBL had bought the platform.
The Solution:
As a result, HBL sought out to find an AI solution provider that could not only build them a chatbot but would also guide them and show them how to get the most out of the technology.
MM and our CareWiz platform. We built them an AI based chatbot that provides:
The ability to pay bills
Customers with instant access to their account
Users with the ability to top-up their mobile phone accounts
A seamless conversational user journey for customer bill payments
A unique aspect of the solution was the addition of multilingual natural language processing (NLP) support in ‘Roman Urdu’ text, so that the solution was accessible to the widest spectrum of HBL’s online users.