SAN ANTONIO–SWBC, which provides a wide range of insurance, mortgage and investment services to individuals, business and financial institutions, reported its financial institution group is partnering with SmartAction, a Calif.-based provider of Artificial Intelligence (AI) voice self-service in order to power a next generation voice-based payment service.
According to the company, SmartAction will provide SWBC with a sophisticated, natural language processing system that uses machine-learning technologies to continuously improve its ability to recognize a caller’s spoken command.
“This allows SWBC to handle complex payment interactions that would have traditionally required a live agent, and to do so in a fashion that doesn’t frustrate the caller,” the company said.
SWBC said the payment technology leverages SmartAction’s natural language capabilities in order to deliver a modern, conversational flow for the caller. Each time the caller responds, SWBC’s API seamlessly receives the information from SmartAction and is able to reply with the appropriate payments service, the company said.
“We worked with SWBC to find new methods to improve the borrower’s experience of paying their loans using voice capabilities,” said Tom Lewis, chief executive officer of SmartAction. “We’re very proud of the qualitative improvements we were able to create by combining our powerful natural language processing and the power of SWBC’s payment processing engines.”
“We looked into many solutions but none had both the qualitative and quantitative improvements needed to work with our technology as seamlessly as SmartAction,” said Jason O’Brien, senior vice president of payments at SWBC financial institution group. “This integration marks one of many improvements in which we are investing across all of our payment channels in order to provide our customers and their borrowers with the best overall experience possible.”