Designing the first AI assistant in banking

Context about BBVA

BBVA, a 170-year-old bank with strong presence in Latin America and Europe, began its digital transformation in 2009. In 2015, we revamped BBVA's mobile app and web platform, expanding features and enhancing usability.

The app was named "best banking app in the world" by Forrester for three years running. Our Apple Store rating jumped from 2.9 to 4.7 stars, establishing BBVA as the most tech-forward bank. But some users in rural areas didn't like the change to a digital first bank because of technology barriers and missed talking to the agents at their local branches.

Target user profiles

1. People with low digital literacy in Mexico that don’t enjoy using digital platforms.
2. Early adopters in Spain that embrace new technologies first.

Opposite ends of the spectrum in digital literacy, the first group out of need and the second group out of curiosity.

Goals

• Enable users with low digital literacy to manage their finances with a conversation. Improving usability and expanding functionalities of the mobile app.
• To expand customer service channels, reduce call center wait time.
• To expand BBVA’s artificial intelligence capabilities, to gather knowledge derived from financial data, positioning BBVA as a tech company and not just a bank.

How we solved this problem

We launched a conversational user interface because after I worked on relaunching the mobile app and the web portal, I realized that even a “perfectly” designed app would not work for everyone, we needed a new type of interaction to help people that feel intimidated by traditional digital interfaces.

Messy design process

Since this project used new technology, we followed an iterative, non-linear design process I planned with help of my mentor, Jonah Burlingame and the best researcher I know, Grace Auscuasiati.

1. Brainstorming: Taking inspiration from an old rejected idea
2. Prototyping with body storming to align stakeholders and technical partners
3. Turning video scenarios into wireframes to increase fidelity
4. User testing 1: Defining interactions
5. User testing 2: Exploring content and jobs to be done
6. User testing 3: Wizard of Oz
7. Expanding our design system with visual design
8. Emotional design: Defining personality of the avatar
9. Prototyping at scale with supervised Deep Learning in WhatsApp

The outcomes

• Reduced customer service wait time from ~7 minutes with the call center to less than 1 minute with the AI assistant.
• Reduced call center load and cost.
• BBVA became the first financial institution to offer services within WhatsApp and Amazon Alexa.
• Forrester awarded BBVA's mobile banking app first place globally for three consecutive years, citing "exceptional functionality and user experience" and the use of intelligent virtual agents for personalized, intuitive service.
• BBVA developed Recommender System capabilities for this project, leading to the launch of their AI Factory, a unit with over 400 data scientists and ML engineers working on Artificial intelligence.

Success metrics

• Over 108,000 conversations on the first week.
• App Store rating increased from 2.9 to 4.6 stars in 6 months.
• 73% of the conversations were marked as “useful” on the exit survey.
• The AI assistant, launched in 14 countries, remains a top feature of the mobile app after 6 years.

Constraints we faced

• Designing a conversational interface without prototyping tools for this use case forced us to be resourceful and adapt other tools to learn.
• Working with an international team forced us to over communicate and make sure all assets are very well explained during hand-off.
• The smartest people are the busiest, so we had to make a case to stakeholders and highlight the benefits of the project to be able to work with the smartest people in the organization.

Takeaways

• Constant communication with stakeholders is very important, and making an effort to understand what others do will turned into allies.
• Keep rejected ideas in your back pocket. They will be useful in the future.
• Pursuing progress is more important than following a process.