While Dave, a neobank and personal finance app, has been using artificial intelligence to underwrite its products since the company’s inception in 2017, the fintech’s latest use of generative AI is producing promising results on the platform’s customer service side, said CEO Jason Wilk.
The fintech this month launched DaveGPT, a gen AI-driven chatbot that can respond to customer inquiries in real-time.
The tool, which replaces its DaveBot, is generating an 89% resolution rate, said Wilk.
“It’s pretty impressive, based on what we used to have with our DaveBot, which was significantly lower,” said Wilk.
DaveBot’s “rules-based model” would generate canned responses, Wilk said, compared to DaveGPT’s “more human, large language model approach.”
“People really are getting much more to the bottom of what they're looking for,” he said. “On the consumer side, we know that people want real-time responses these days, especially millennials and Gen Z, which is the majority of our audience at this point. They're not wanting to talk to somebody on the phone, they want real-time chat responses if they can get it. And AI is certainly the best way to get a most human-like response with the best accuracy.”
Wilk said Dave utilized an existing partnership with Aisera, which leverages OpenAI’s capabilities, to access large language models, adjust the content and then come back with the relevant responses.
Wilk said he envisions a future iteration of the product that involves integrating customers’ financial data in order to offer personalized advice.
“The AI can recommend solutions to your problems, such as, ‘How do I save more money this month?’” he said.
With the rollout of DaveGPT, Dave becomes the latest neobank to fold AI into its offerings.
Neobank MoneyLion, in May, detailed plans to launch a search feature powered by ChatGPT in order to allow consumers to search for transactions, offers and products on the platform’s finance marketplace.
AI, Wilk said, helps fintechs like Dave serve more customers without staffing up. The technology allows Dave to serve its 9 million customers with only 300 employees, Wilk said.
“We have a lot of operating leverage compared to incumbent banks,” he said. “AI is another lever we have to be able to do more while not growing our headcount in any kind of major way. So that's a really important way that we can scale. We don't need 1,000 more people for customer support. If anything, we can keep our support team the way it is and this allows us to 10x our capabilities.”
Beyond using AI in its customer support, Wilk said the technology has become a critical part of the firm’s operations.
“DaveGPT is just our customer facing support program, but we're using AI all the way across the company,” he said, adding the fintech uses AI to help underwrite its cash advance product.
“It's really been a critical way for us to improve credit access by giving people access to higher limits, while also keeping our loss rates at a record low,” he said. “The AI can look at thousands of pieces of data from our cash flow-based underwriting that enables us to make better decisions, which again, helps us provide a better experience for credit access with better limits and reduces our loss rates.”
Wilk said he expects gen AI will continue to grow in popularity in the banking and fintech space, both as an underwriting tool and as a means to improve customer satisfaction.
“I think that first and foremost, AI is going to be a game changer for credit,” he said. “And then the customer support stuff will be sort of table stakes which everyone's going to need to keep costs low.”
