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Virgin Money, one of the largest retail banks in the UK, exemplifies the best of the old and the new. It has deep roots in banking with a 180-year heritage. At the same time, it embraces innovation and is committed to a digital-first banking strategy.
In keeping with that strategy, the bank strives to foster digital adoption across its businesses and positive digital experiences for its customers. That’s no small feat: Virgin Money’s offerings range from personal and business savings accounts to credit cards to mortgages to personal loans and insurance, and more.
Those offerings attract a diverse set of customers with varying degrees of technical and financial acumen. In 2021, Virgin Money launched a new credit card. Most customers downloaded the credit card mobile app within the first 60 days of becoming cardholders. While the app was feature-rich, many users resorted to calling the contact centre when they didn’t understand something or needed additional information.
The bank turned to AI to address the issue. With AI, the company could tap into its extensive collection of customer digital experiences to help users find answers to their questions within the mobile app. At the same time, Virgin Money could improve customer satisfaction by enabling those who were tech-savvy to serve themselves without having to go through live agents.
To help develop its new AI strategy and capabilities using Microsoft solutions, Virgin Money engaged IBM Consulting®. IBM Consulting had a strong, longstanding relationship with Microsoft and offered deep industry knowledge and extensive experience implementing Microsoft-specific technologies in the financial services industry. In addition, IBM Consulting was widely recognised in the UK for its conversational banking solutions, having implemented them in most major UK banks.
An intelligent, integrated virtual assistant: Redi
After careful analysis, IBM Consulting advised Virgin Money to develop an AI-powered conversational assistant, named Redi, accessible through the bank’s mobile app. With Microsoft technology as its foundation, the new assistant would interact directly with customers using natural language understanding (NLU) and connect to the company’s core systems through APIs, enabling customers to make changes to their accounts in real time.
Based on those recommendations, IBM Consulting designed a service for a modern conversational banking experience. Microsoft provided expertise throughout on its products and their capabilities, once again exemplifying the collaborative relationship between the two companies.
The IT foundation for Redi consists of a full-stack Microsoft-powered digital host on Power Virtual Agents (PVA) (now part of the Microsoft Copilot Suite) and Bot Framework Composer solutions hosted on Virgin Money’s private cloud environment. The aim of this ambitious undertaking was to create the most comprehensive conversational AI assistant for financial services in the UK.
As part of the bank’s overall strategy, Virgin Money and IBM Consulting structured the implementation in phases, addressing different areas of the business with each phase. They started with the bank’s credit card business, with the concept of creating a reusable platform aligned with the bank’s long-term goal of creating centralised AI-first financial services.
After six months of development, IBM Consulting and Virgin Money launched the new credit card AI-powered virtual assistant in March of 2023. Redi is designed to be friendly, projecting warmth and humanity. Customers can engage in natural conversations with it to self-serve based on over 100 different queries in the credit card app and complete end-to-end account updates, such as increasing credit limits, through in-app chat. The virtual assistant also has proactive messaging capabilities—making Virgin Money the market leader in this area—and can directly message users in the app with updates about their accounts if, for example, their card is about to expire.
In June of 2024, Virgin Money and IBM Consulting launched an update to the Personal Current Account (PCA) chatbot. The solution builds upon the existing virtual assistant’s capabilities using Microsoft technologies and advances the bank’s ultimate aim of offering a single, consistent experience across all Virgin Money products.
IBM has earned high marks from Virgin Money for its extensive experience and guidance throughout the project. According to Adam Paice, Head of Digital Proposition at Virgin Money: "We have benefited from a truly exceptional IBM support team on the ground to steer us away from common mistakes that are made when deploying these services."
Since launching, Redi has generated significant customer engagement, with an all-time total of over two million interactions. Redi’s integration capabilities deliver a strategic competitive advantage to Virgin Money that other financial services companies often struggle to match. Virgin Money has integrated over 50 API calls within the various customer journeys, in order to maximise customer experience enabling it to connect to its back-end systems and provide tailored support to customers.
Remarkably, the virtual assistant has contained 57% of customer interactions at peak. In addition, the AI-powered virtual assistant has contributed to a boost in credit card application’s smile scores: 94% of customers surveyed who used it were satisfied with their interactions, 84% found it easy to use and 91% were able to get what they wanted from it. Through its breakthrough conversational banking experience, Virgin Money has been recognised in the industry as the “Best Application of AI or ML in Financial Services” (link resides outside of ibm.com) in the 2024 Cards and Payments Awards.
“It’s absolutely fantastic to win this award,” says Paice. “Our customers tell us how much they enjoy interacting with Redi in the credit card app, and to receive industry recognition of our hard work to create delightfully surprising experiences for our customers is the cherry on top. Our partnership with IBM has helped us to get the most out of the suite of Microsoft Co-pilot products and find the balance between innovation and control.”
Next up, Virgin Money is working with IBM Consulting to combine the PCA and credit card functions into one multi-product virtual assistant, which will incorporate OpenAI and Microsoft generative AI technology.
Virgin Money (link resides outside of ibm.com) is an FTSE 250 company and one of the largest retail banks operating in the UK. The company has a 180-year heritage and a digital-first banking strategy. It is a subsidiary of Clydesdale Bank, CYBG plc and Virgin Group.
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Produced in United States of America, September 2024.
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