Banking Innovation of the Month: Maya - Banorte’s personal assistant

As one of the leading banks in Mexico, Banorte is continually innovating to deliver a better experience for its customers. With constant connectivity a feature of 21st century life, people seek personalized experiences and interactions with their banks. To that end, Banorte launched their artificial-intelligence-powered personal assistant Maya. Maya is a dynamic personal assistant that helps customers out with a variety of tasks. Thanks to their efforts, Banorte has been chosen as Efma’s Banking Innovation of the month winner in June.

Today’s customers want answers and immediacy when it comes to banking. That’s exactly what Maya provides. The personal assistant answers users’ questions about financial products and services. It also helps clients with payments, transfers or raising a claim. The tool powerfully enables customers to take care of their financial needs.

Launched last year, Maya can assist users through both chat and voice channels. As with any AI-powered tool, the challenge was to create a natural, flowing conversation with customers. In order to create these types of interactions, Banorte used IBM’s Watson. With IBM’s Watson, the bank only needed to train and calibrate the system one time before implementing it throughout the bank. This speeds up time to market and has allowed the bank to quickly roll out the assistant to all of the bank’s channels.

Maya is available in Banorte’s public website, online banking page, and recently became available in Google Assistant’s mobile app and for Google Home. It is also available via Amazon’s Alexa mobile app and for Amazon Echo devices. Banorte is convinced that voice interactions with devices will continue to grow as a way of communicating with one’s bank. That is why they are the first and only bank on Google Assistant in Mexico and available with both personal assistants.

The results so far have been promising. Their new multichannel offering has increased the bank’s Net Promoter Score (NPS). A higher NPS is indicative of elevated customer satisfaction with their banking experience. On average, Maya is assisting 47,000 users per month. With more customers using the personal assistant, it has reduced contact center calls and branch visits. This has driven the overall cost of servicing customers down.  

Banorte has long been focused on building a service-oriented culture that meets customers’ needs and creates client-focused innovations. Maya is yet another part of that tradition as the Mexican bank improves and strengthens its relationship with its clients.

Banorte’s “Maya personal assistant” innovation will be automatically selected as a nominee for the Efma-Accenture Innovation in Banking Awards 2020. We will be taking a hiatus for the forseeable future in choosing innovations of the month. Nevertheless you can submit your innovations on the Efma Innovation in Banking portal for the 2020 Awards. Participation is free of charge and open to all banking institutions.