Active.Ai : 3 Years of partnering with the best to build Conversational AI for Financials.

By Ravishankar, Co-founder & CEO of Active.Ai

We are at the cusp of a massive transformation in the way financial services is currently being served and consumed globally. Having worked very closely with Financials, Internet and Technology behemoths across markets and most importantly consumers of financial services across verticals, here are some of the challenges our customers put before us as we began our journey in 2016.

• Changing Rails: Customers are on Mobile + Data+ Messaging — Over 3 Billion+ worldwide access “unstructured data” monthly. Be in Consumer to Consumer interactions or Consumer to Business/Government.
• SuperApps: They are the lifeline for billions of users. Offering everything from ride share to grocery to financial services to entertainment. They are the real disruptors unbundling banks and owning customers. Apps from Financials will struggle to compete. (eg. Wechat, Grab, to name a few)
• Licensing (or De Licensing) of financial services: For regulators their agenda is inclusion , stronger participants with better engagement. E-commerce, Internet majors have already proven to bring this to scale, at lower costs with significant capital to play. Multiple licensing classes for banking, payments, insurance are being created globally to enable Internet and new age companies participate in the financial ecosystem to enable greater inclusion and lower pricing points. Incumbent financials are already challenged in markets across Asia, Europe and North America.
• Open Banking and Open Infrastructure: Regulations and systems being created to share access and information across the existing financial system with newer participants. Challengers who access this framework will be able to offer better data driven insights and products than incumbents as they already have enormous understanding of their own customers. (Eg. India’s instant payment platform is dominated by Internet Majors- Banks lost significant traffic as they became pass through vehicles).
• Generation Z: 30% of the world population is young , mobile first and likes digital assistants more than human assistants.

3 Years of Innovation and Partnerships:

• Building for an AI first world: Active.ai has been investing and building a robust platform stack for Financials to deliver a superior engagement. Our learnings over the last 3 years with our partner institutions and technology companies has enabled our customers to remain relevant, win new customers and more importantly be recognised as digital leaders in Banking, Payments, Insurance and Securities business.
• Omnichannel and SuperApps: We predicted an Omni Channel collaborative world when we started up. Today we are proudly serving our customers almost everywhere from Web, Apps, SuperApps , Messaging platforms to IoT in multiple languages to form deeper, meaningful users’ engagements across touchpoints.
• Neo Digital institutions: Co-creating has been our DNA and we are today proud to have innovated for our clients in creating some of the most exciting emerging digital financial platforms for them where it has helped garnered awards and recognition for innovation.
• Ecosystem partnerships: Our ecosystem partners across Core platform vendors, Cloud Leaders and Payment pioneers have collaboratively supported and integrated with our stack to deliver great outcomes for our clients.
• Team and Board: At the core of what we do is a fantastic team prides itself in customer-centricity and pushing the limits on innovation. Our board who have been incredible supporters to the numerous challenges of building an innovation company. We are extremely thankful to each one of you.

To the next 3 years:

• Readying for the challenge of over 50 million users to be accessing our platforms.
• The challenge of customers in over 4 continents accessing services through their financials.
• Continuing to innovate and build better Conversational AI for our clients.