Citi has pledged to digitize every aspect of their business and so the company has started to text the idea of virtual agents in their commercial call centers; “Our intent is to try to handle the more routine calls that cardholders and our corporate clients are telling us they want serviced as quickly as possible so that we could let the live agents handle the more complex questions,” said Gonca Latif-Schmitt, the bank’s Global Head of Commercial Cards, to American Banker; the bots can handle up to 4 million calls a year or about 40 percent of the call volume and is using technology from a company called Interactions; a neutral global accent was very important for the bank as they did not want it to be too robotic so customers would feel comfortable; bots are becoming an integral part of banking as Juniper Research recently estimated that in the next five years the technology will grow 3,150% and save banks $7.3 billion in 2023. American Banker
