Conversational AI innovator Clinc has partnered with Işbank, the largest private bank in Turkey, which will deploy the Finovate Best of Show winner’s technology within its two mobile banking apps. The bank’s mobile banking app will provide users with a voice-activated intelligent personal assistant, while the bank’s mobile wallet payments app will feature Clinc’s AI brain and enable in-store payments and money transfers.
The announcement makes Işbank the first global FI to offer conversational AI with multi-language support. It also means that Clinc’s natural language platform, Finie, is now deployed in six countries and in 80 different languages. The partnership with Isbank alone will put Clinc’s technology in the hands of more than 4.5 million app users.
Clinc CEO and co-founder Dr. Jason Mars demonstrating Finie, a conversational AI platform, at FinovateSpring 2016.
“In contrast to the rule-based, bot-approach taken by all other vendors in the market, the fundamentals of our deep neural-network architecture enable us to break down the barriers to global adoption of conversational A.I.,” Clinc CEO Dr. Jason Mars said. “We can deploy to a bank in Istanbul or Singapore just as quickly and easily as we can deploy to a bank in Chicago or New York.”
Leveraging advanced natural language processing, machine learning, and deep neural networks, Clinc’s conversational AI platform is able to comprehend, recall, and respond to unstructured, everyday human speech. The technology understands speech patterns, word and sentence structure, and sentiment, surpassing other solutions that merely convert speech to text and rely on a set of pre-coded responses. This is also key to the multi-language capabilities of Clinc’s technology. “We’re miles ahead because the only other way to do multi-language is to start from scratch, and to code new rules and new grammar for every new language,” Mars explained.
Clinc demonstrated its Finie conversational AI technology at FinovateFall 2016, winning Best of Show. Last month, the company announced a partnership with Tulsa, Oklahoma-based Enacomm that will make it easier for smaller banks and credit unions to adopt AI chatbot technology. In August, Clinc integrated its technology with the Alexa skill for members of USAA.
Founded in 2015 and based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Clinc has raised $7.75 million in funding and includes Drive Capital, Cahoots Holdings, Hyde Park Venture Partners, and individual investor Stuart Porter among its investors. Company co-founder and CEO Mars was named one of the Top 10 Most Innovative CEOs in Banking 2017 by Bank Innovation. Check out his thoughts on what it takes to become a successful fintech start-up in our roundtable conversation from earlier this year.