We stand with Ukraine

Expert System Banking Customer Wins Prestigious Innovation Award

24 March 2017

BNL – BNP Paribas Group distinguishes in “knowledge transfer and change management” thanks to Expert System AI approach: the Bank Group leverages the power of Cogito cognitive technology to optimize internal customer assistance available for more than 14,000 employees

BNL, a major Italian banking group and part of the BNP Paribas Group, the European leader in international banking and financial services, received the most prestigious Italian award for innovation in banking services from the Italian Banking Association (ABI). BNL was recognized in the “knowledge transfer and change management” category for its semantic search engine project, based on an automatic system for searching and categorizing documents powered by the cognitive technology Cogito from Expert System. The system simplifies the so called “internal customer assistance” service and optimizes help desk activities.

Thanks to Cogito, more than 14,000 of the Bank Group’s employees no longer need to consult the help desk for each request, but can interact directly with the system. Cogito’s ability to correctly understand the meaning of words and entire sentences allows it to automatically process the natural language requests of customer service operators. Combined with a customized taxonomy created with Business Partner Italia’s innovation team, the service provides the highest level of accuracy for analysis and response, resulting in a significant savings of time and resources.

When BNL employees search the internal portal for information on regulatory documentations, internal procedures, tutorials, data sheets, FAQs etc., the system returns the most relevant results. This improves the user experience and significantly reduces costs. The search engine uses Cogito’s text analysis capabilities to recover the most pertinent, relevant content from more than 8,000 FAQs and 20,000 documents that have been automatically classified according to a taxonomy based on thousands of categories.

“We are pleased to see the innovative vision of BNL recognized by the most prestigious award for innovation in banking services,” commented Alessandro Monico, Italy Sales Director Expert System Enterprise. “The current market requires banks to constantly improve competitiveness and to improve the quality of services, while reducing time and costs of customer assistance. Our cognitive technology starts from an understanding of meaning and allows BNL to extract value from the enormous wealth of available information to lessen the pressure on customer care operators by facilitating rapid access to documents of interest.”

The ABI award for innovation in banking services, promoted by the Italian Banking Association (ABI), is part of the national award for innovation that promotes the industry’s most innovative projects and services.