With the advancements in Natural Language Processing, man-and-machine conversations have become far enriched than the basic Q&A with a chatbot. Intelligent Virtual Assistants understand intent, preferences and are built to learn with every conversation. NLP, AI and ML work in unison to give the impression of natural interaction as one would have with a human. Like every other major sector of the economy, FinTech is an area that is a big beneficiary of the boons of AI. So here we present to you five chatbots that have been deployed in FinTech in India.

• PAi: National Payment Corporation of India (NPCI) has launched an AI based virtual assistant – PAi ­– to improve digital financial inclusion in India. The chatbot works round the clock for assisting users with accurate information on NPCI products like FASTag, RuPay, UPI, AePS. Developed by Bengaluru based startup CoRover, PAi is intended to help increase the adoption of digital payments among Indian citizens. Read more...
• Ask VAHEI: As part of the Digital India programme and for ease of doing business, the Directorate General of Foreign Trade (DGFT) has launched an AI-powered chatbot to cater to queries of its users. The VAHEI (Virtual Assistant to Help Exporters and Importers) chatbot can help with queries related to Foreign Trade Policy of India and DGFT. Using the VAHEI bot, exporters/importers/public users can also check status of various applications and authorisations. Users can see new notifications, trade notice, public notice & circulars on chatbot. The chatbot gives text responses for a simple query or provides the relevant URLs. If no direct response is found, it finds references in Foreign trade policy/ Handbook of procedure and opens related section in PDF. After first query, VAHEI intelligently understands context and gives auto-suggestions to the user. Read more...
• RIL's chatbot for shareholders: In June 2020, Reliance Industries launched the country’s first Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled chatbot on WhatsApp, partner Facebook’s platform, to provide answers to shareholders regarding RIL’s Rs 53,125-crore rights issue. While the AI chatbot replies only in English, the platform has FAQ videos in regional languages such as Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Kannada and Bangla. But this AI chatbot will keep evolving. The quality of answers will continue to improve as the chatbot refines its responses as per the questions. The chatbot was created by Jio Haptik, previously Haptik Infotech. Read more...
• HDFC Bank: In December 2016, HDFC Bank introduced its chatbot on Facebook Messenger to promote banking on channels other than net banking and mobile banking.Both existing customers and non-bank customers can find 'HDFC Bank OnChat' on Facebook, either by using the desktop application or the mobile application. The bank partnered with Niki.ai to create and integrate the chatbot on Facebook's platform to work as a virtual concierge service. This partnership aimed at providing an AI-based conversational banking experience to customers without leaving the chat window. Using the platform, HDFC Bank was able to acquire new customers, out of which 25% of users were non-HDFC bank customers. Read more...
• ICICI Bank: To tackle with the high influx of customer queries, ICICI Bank has introduced an AI engine to process queries from customers using text analysis and semantic analysis.The use of cognitive tools helps the bank's system to understand the query, process the query, and solve the issue through the bank's interface and revert to customers with the right solutions. The use of machine learning allows the engine to self-learn the querying processing and to provide better results to its customers. With the use of this AI engine, the bank is now able to optimize its remittance operations and can respond to queries in real-time. Also, the bank has started to use this AI engine in document scrutiny process using optical character recognition. Read more...

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