EXCLUSIVE – Financial services-focused conversational AI company, Clinc is contemplating a B2C product, Clinc CEO and co-founder Jason Mars told Bank Innovation.
Fresh after winning “Best in Show” at Bank AI a few weeks ago, Clinc announced at Money 20/20 in Las Vegas yesterday a new partnership with Turkey’s largest bank IsBank, to integrate its conversational A.I. platform into the bank’s mobile app.
The actual app is pretty cool. Unlike competitors that typically use parts of speech tagging, Clinc likens itself to a Google Assistant rather than a rules driven chatbot type. The technology is called deep neural networks, employed by Clinc end to end as a simpler and speedier way to transcribe audio waves.
“This is our fundamentally differentiating factor,” Mars said.
And indeed, the app is intelligent in that it can easily translate a colloquial audio request into an action, so rather than having to ask, “what is my account balance?,” one can get away with asking the more colloquial, “how much money do I have?”
In a private demo to Bank Innovation, the app responded to the question, “How much money did I drop on shoes two years ago?”
Clinc currently has 14 banking partners, including USAA Bank. It is available in 80 languages and dialects. It works on Google Home as well as Amazon’s Alexa, among other things.
Right now, one can use Clinc only through the banking app of a bank that it has integrated with.
But it seems like a natural progression for Clinc to introduce itself as a standalone app, which could work on all of a user’s bank accounts, regardless of whether or not that bank is a partner with Clinc.
“That’s something we are thinking about, as we continue to grow and expand and meet certain goals,” Mars said.
“A B2C application is definitely in the pipeline for the future. There is a lot of potential there,” he told Bank Innovation. “And, that’s all I can say for now.”
Indeed, the company is still young, established in 2016 at Finovate Fall in New York where it also won “Best in Show.”
And yet, Clinc is flirting with a number of growth plans. For one, the company is projected to have 100 employees in the next 3-6 months. It started off with just 7 employees only a year ago.
Additionally, Clinc is in the process of setting up an office in London. Mars declined to provide a specific date for that opening, except for saying, “it’s happening soon.”
“Canada will be our next office after London,” he added.