İşbank welcomes you to the world of conversational banking, where people can now interact with a non-human about their finances. The largest private bank in Turkey with more than 15 million customers and 100 million transactions per day, İşbank has always been leading in digital banking innovation. Since 2007 when it launched the first mobile banking platform in the Turkish market, İşbank has always been investing in the right technology and innovative thinking. Now, leveraging AI across voice and mobile interactions, İşbank proudly presents Maxi, its new AI-powered digital personal assistant.
As İşbank’s strategic digital transformation partner, Commencis designed the visual interface of Maxi, developed and integrated into its core banking application, İşcep.
The Challenge
Responsible for the design and integration of Maxi, we are well aware that dialogue-based interfaces are still new in our lives. It can be a difficult process to make chatbots sound like people and mimic the natural flow of human conversation. So, the chatbots need to sound natural both over voice and text, as well as be flexible in their responses.
Our Approach
Our approach was always “human-first” as we wanted to build the design around the flow of a natural conversation. We wanted customers to speak or write to Maxi as they would to a close friend. To achieve this, we first conducted extensive research on the chatbot ecosystem and presented 12 different functionality and interaction proposals to İşbank.
To ensure people enjoyed speaking to Maxi, we focused on the use of white areas and component animations in the interface design. We prefered to apply a minimalist approach into our design: typography, colors, background.
Simpler, Faster and More Personalized Way
With the final design of Maxi, İşcep offers its users a simpler, faster and more personalised way for customers to manage their money.
Purchase History
Maxi makes it easy to see your purchase history, which can be grouped into categories and sorted by date range. For example, now you can check exactly how much was spent on groceries in the last three months.
Transaction Details
Maxi can show you your category-based spending history, such as, how much was spent at a certain place, the highest purchase in a certain category, and transactions above a certain amount of money.
Budgeting
Thanks to Maxi’s AI software, it can forecast your future spending habits and recommend a monthly budget according to past purchases. This provides customers with foresight on future activities such as holidays and travel.
Money Transfer
Maxi facilitates fast and easy money transfers. All you need to say is: “Send money to mum”.
Account and Credit Card Details
Maxi can quickly display an overview of account balances and credit card spend.
Over time, Maxi will provide increasingly personalised services by analysing each customer’s historical interactions and combining it with existing data. These insights allow Maxi to provide value to customers proactively, as well as offer recommended best practices or shortcuts to complex queries — something that has never been achievable at scale before in the financial services industry.
A Differentiated Technical Design
Our technical approach and know-how differentiated and improved Maxi’s performance. Here are some of the technical highlights:
- Easy SDK integration
- Usability without any dependency on an internal or external library (except for the animation library Lottie)
- Configuring the keyword workflow so any customer query would be answered satisfactorily with generic component structure
- Fast data transmission for voice and text messages
- Detection and analysis of customer voice queries
- Optimal interface for transmission and execution of data between SDK and the carrier applications (i.e. İşCep and Maximum Mobil)
- Performance improvements for messaging table and animations
Capturing the future of AI and the financial services industry
AI-powered chatbots have been the industry game-changer for banks. At Commencis, we’re excited and privileged to be İşbank’s partner in the realm of conversational banking and set the new standard for customer experience. We’re the witnesses to an exciting future where big data, advanced analytics, and predictive AI models intersect. The new possibilities for financial service providers are endless and only by embracing this new future will companies continue to thrive in a competitive marketplace.