AI in finance: Top use cases and benefits to know

Customer service is a critical function of any finance-oriented business. Customers expect fast resolutions regardless of their location or the channel where the interaction takes place. With AI in finance, companies can meet the challenges of delivering efficient, high-quality support without compromising budgets, data security, or customer satisfaction.

Below, we’ll break down the top benefits and use cases for AI in finance, as well as explore AI’s impact on customer satisfaction and the future of financial services.

More in this guide:

• Top use cases for AI in finance
• Benefits of using AI in finance
• How does AI improve customer satisfaction in finance?
• The future of AI in finance: What’s next?
• Frequently asked questions
• Give your finance CX a boost with Zendesk AI

Top use cases for AI in finance

When dealing with financials, personalizing conversations can be difficult because of strict data privacy laws, potentially hindering the customer experience (CX). That’s where AI comes in: Nearly every customer touchpoint presents an opportunity to introduce AI for faster and more personalized financial queries or transactions. According to the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2024, 69 percent of CX leaders say AI can help make digital interactions more human.

Here are the top use cases companies can expect to take advantage of when they leverage AI for financial services:

• Personalized service: AI analyzes customer sentiment, behavior, and preferences to offer tailored recommendations, such as new cards or offers that might interest them, enhancing the overall customer experience and increasing engagement.
• Account details: AI-driven tools can efficiently gather and organize account information, allowing customers to retrieve essential details with AI’s natural language processing (NLP) capabilities—and retrieve them quickly thanks to seamless API integration.
• User authentication: Companies can enhance security with AI that uses machine learning and deep learning algorithms to authenticate users, ensuring seamless yet secure account access.
• Card activation: The card activation process gets less complicated with intelligent bots, like AI agents, that guide customers step by step through processes, ensuring a smooth and quick activation experience.
• Lost or stolen cards: Customers can easily report lost or stolen cards through AI-powered interfaces, which can promptly disable the card and initiate a replacement order without requiring extensive manual input from an agent.
• FAQs: Bots with AI can handle frequently asked questions—like how to update contact information or stop a check payment—and source relevant knowledge base article suggestions, providing immediate responses and freeing up human agents to focus on more complex customer inquiries.
• Fraud support: AI provides immediate support for customers needing to claim fraud, guiding them through the necessary steps and documentation.
• Transfer cancellations: By employing AI, financial institutions can automate the cancellation of money transfers, allowing customers to easily initiate cancellations through voice or chat commands without needing to navigate complex menus.
• Transfer status updates: AI can keep customers informed by providing real-time updates on the status of their money transfers via push notifications, emails, or chat messages.
• Login issues: AI systems can identify common login issues and provide instant troubleshooting guidance, helping users regain access to their accounts quickly and efficiently.
• Account updates: AI-enabled platforms can empower customers to change their personal information or upgrade their accounts securely and independently, streamlining the process and giving human agents time to focus on more critical initiatives.
• Service updates or account statements: AI chatbots can facilitate the signup process for service updates and automate the request for account statements, making it easier for users to stay informed about their financial activities.

The list of use cases for AI in finance will likely grow, as will the many benefits that businesses will realize from using it.

Benefits of using AI in finance

The benefits of using AI in finance are abundant—let’s look at the top five that finance companies can expect to take advantage of.

Efficient workflows with automation

With AI automation, CX software can automate workflows for optimal efficiency. It reduces redundancies and repetitive work, giving a boost to efficiency and productivity. For example, AI can comb customer service tickets to identify common queries that are prime candidates for automation—repetitive actions like email verification, password resets, and more. Then, it can flag those actions for CX leaders to implement new workflows that automate the process. Additionally, AI quality assurance (QA) can deliver insights on how to improve agent interactions by flagging metrics like negative customer sentiment.

Consistent, high-quality customer support

AI also helps CX support teams deliver top-tier service without ballooning operational costs. With each new customer interaction, AI draws on every past interaction to gather context that can help predict customer needs. Then, it can easily personalize responses with conversational AI that naturally responds to customers in their language. This means that financial services can cater to customers in multiple languages without outsourcing to a call center to receive the inquiry in that language. All the while, it maintains consistency with business messaging protocols and reduces errors to ensure all customers receive high-quality, personalized support.

Intelligent data processing and analysis

Artificial intelligence is key to unlocking nearly unlimited data processing capabilities. AI can analyze 100 percent of customer interactions to discover patterns among different customer service metrics like satisfaction or customer effort scores. Then, it can synthesize insights to help improve various operations without requiring internal teams to dig through data. Instead, the AI analyzes it quickly so teams can focus on optimizing performance, not sifting through mountains of information. This way, financial services teams always have visibility on how customers feel about their support interactions and can make modifications to improve satisfaction.

Round-the-clock availability

24/7 support is invaluable in the financial services industry, where companies cater to customers across multiple time zones who require fast, accurate responses. With tools like AI agents, financial services companies can be there for customers during highly sensitive or urgent cases, like when a fraudulent transaction posts to their account. These AI agents can respond to inquiries, surface relevant answers or information, complete actions like activations or transfers, and escalate tickets for human agents to follow up if needed.

High-strength data security

Finance businesses need to prioritize customer data privacy to build and keep trust. AI uses encryption and machine learning algorithms to authenticate customers’ identities when using their accounts, and it can lock cards or block transactions when it detects potentially fraudulent activity. If customers lose their physical cards or can’t access their accounts because they forgot their login information, AI interfaces can understand the request and provide empathetic service to help. Then, it can walk them through the process of replacing the card or getting back into their account.

How does AI improve customer satisfaction in finance?

Customer satisfaction is one of the most important customer service metrics for any company to keep an eye on. That includes finance companies that face fierce competition and need to keep customer engagement high to avoid potential churn.

With AI, the financial services industry gets a significant boost in customer satisfaction via more efficient, personalized experiences. For example, AI agents can handle routine inquiries and transactions, reducing wait times and improving customer service availability. They provide nonstop service, ensuring that customers get the help that they need anytime and anywhere. They’re also intuitive, using customer sentiment and intent to shape replies.

When human support agents take the reins, customer satisfaction still gets a boost from AI-supported interactions. Omnichannel CX gives customer support agents all the relevant AI-sourced context they need in one place so they know what customers want and feel before they even start a conversation. Then, they can personalize those conversations with that context. All of this leads to highly satisfied and engaged customers.

The future of AI in finance: What’s next?

The future of financial CX is bright—even beyond the applications of AI in finance that already exist. In the future, customer experiences will be even more fluid and intentional than they are today.

According to the Zendesk AI-powered Customer Experience Trends Report 2024, it’s only a matter of time before 100 percent of customer interactions involve AI to some extent—with AI resolving 80 percent of those independently. As AI progresses, it will get even smarter at perceiving customer sentiment and intent in every interaction to predict issues and proactively solve them in advance. This means any customer with a question about a transaction, their account, or anything else can receive prompt, accurate service.

Frequently asked questions

Give your finance CX a boost with Zendesk AI

By automating routine inquiries, providing context and suggestions to support agents, and personalizing customer interactions, AI-driven CX helps finance companies focus on what matters most: customer satisfaction. With high satisfaction, businesses can improve retention and focus more time on critical initiatives to drive growth. AI tools keep customer information secure and help them quickly get the answers they need, streamlining operations and fostering deeper, more meaningful customer relationships.

With AI tailor-made to provide great CX, financial services can use Zendesk to optimize customer service operations to ensure they’re efficient, consistent, and primed to improve satisfaction.

Siemens Financial Services

Siemens builds CX relationship with Zendesk to expand into AI integration

“Ultimately, we want to get to the point where we have a holistic global digital customer journey. With Zendesk as the foundation and the various apps and integrations such as AI sitting on top of that, we are getting closer and closer to achieving that.”

Steve Franklin

Head of Global Customer Services

Read customer story