ING Direct chooses Expert System’s AI-based automation to improve business processes

Expert System today announced in a press release that financial services group ING has chosen to extend AI-based automation benefits across the organisation with the goal of improving back-office operations.

ING explained in the press release that Expert System’s Natural Language Understanding (NLU) capabilities will be key in augmenting ING customer service agents and accelerating the application of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to a broader range of knowledge-based processes.

ING claims that it currently has over 51,000 team members that offer retail and banking services, products, and solutions to customers in over 40 countries globally which comes with the need to process a high number of queries, emails, requests, complaints, and task allocation. A capability such as RPA which enables AI-based automation can streamline processes such as these and free up valuable resources and time enabling more value to the end customer.

Bastiaan Zaad, Product Owner of Natural Language Processing at ING explained what the AI-based automation benefits will mean for ING by saying: “Today, thanks to Expert System’s AI, all our customer relation centers in the Netherlands benefit from a much more reliable and much more accurate email management process, with 100% of emails being automatically processed by the platform. Our next objective is to extend those benefits to our centers based in Belgium and in the other countries where ING operates.”

Expert System has a platform that has a number of custom NLU and machine learning algorithms with the aim to help organisations bring human-like comprehension of various texts to accelerate business processes, enhance knowledge discovery, and improve decision making.

While RPA as a capability is known for excelling in the automation of various standard admin tasks, it falls short in automating those that require the ability to accurately comprehend, categorise, correlate, and extract knowledge or information from data.

Expert System claims to address these limitations by enabling the integration between RPA bots and advanced NLU algorithms which reduce manual activities and extend the reach and accuracy of automation to more complex processes and use cases.

The ability to understand the content of business documents is a key factor in maximising the ROI of RPA investments and has become an increasingly popular capability to have within the insurance and finance industries.

Expert System has an impressive client roster with ING not being the only banking business they serve with others including globally known financial service organisations such as BNP Paribas, Lloyds, and Rabobank.

Due to the rise in demand for RPA capabilities and AI-based automation, there have been a number of successful funding rounds on the technology with Blue Prism raising over $120m to bolster their RPA capabilities two months ago.

Alain Biancardi, VP of Sales and Marketing at Expert System France and Benelux said what the implementation of their NLU AI will mean for ING going forward by saying: “Artificial Intelligence is creating new opportunities to scale and drive more value from the implementation of RPA. By empowering bots with our NLU features, ING will be able to extend back-office efficiencies, augment decision making and enhance customer service.”

ING states that its purpose is to empower people to stay a step ahead in life and in business which puts Expert Systems in a valuable position to help ING meet their purpose with their AI-based automation by speeding up processes and making business operations more efficient.