Sales Automation
Asteria wanted to reduce the manual effort banks spend advising SME customers on loans and product options because relationship staff had to perform costly, time-consuming individualized analysis before recommending the right financial services.
Reported impact
Asteria showed that gen AI could automate the most time-intensive steps of SME financial advisory, reduce advisory effort, and help partner banks market relevant services with a more personalized digital experience.
Asteria used IBM's FintechX program to prototype a banking advisor that combines conversational AI, retrieval, and generative summarization. In a four-week MVP pilot, Asteria built the Asteria Smart Finance Advisor with IBM watsonx Assistant as the front end, IBM Watson Discovery for data querying, and IBM watsonx.ai for summarization and content generation. The advisor is designed to sit inside each bank's online portal, prompt SME users with updates about business health such as overdrafts or low cash balances, answer questions, and recommend relevant products. Behind the scenes, the system pulls customer and product context through Discovery and uses watsonx.ai to automate profile analysis and recommendation logic that had previously required manual advisor effort. The pilot showed that the early loan-advisory steps could be largely automated while preserving a path for bankers to focus on higher-value relationship work.
SME financial context and bank product information are queried through Watson Discovery, watsonx.ai generates summaries and recommendations, and watsonx Assistant presents the insights in a portal-based advisor that can answer questions and suggest next-best products.
The front end is powered by IBM watsonx Assistant technology. The data querying capabilities are powered by the IBM Watson Discovery solution, and the summarization and content generation processes are driven by the IBM watsonx.ai AI studio.
This would reduce the time spent on a loan application advisory process by 33%, as demonstrated by the pilot
When users from an SME log in, they will receive a prompt from the advisor that shares an update on the financial health of the business.
bank advisors spent an average of three hours evaluating the SME's business
the customer profile analysis and product recommendation steps of the process could, with the help of IBM watsonx, be fully automated.
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