Intelligent Systems Report € June € 1996 € Volume 2 € No. 6

Intelligent agents help banks go online

By David Blanchard
Editor

Thanks in part to the efforts of Edify Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif.), financial institutions have begun offering intelligent agent-based automated banking services via the World Wide Web. Deploying agents addresses a number of electronic banking trends, such as customer demand for "anytime, anywhere" service, product time-to-market imperatives, and increasingly complex back-office integration challenges.

"The Web is emerging as a strategic new channel for banks to deliver home banking and bill payment services," explained Brent Robinson, senior VP of Visa Interactive (Herndon, Va.), an electronic banking service provider. Visa plans to incorporate Edify's Electronic Workforce intelligent agent software into the solution set marketed by its 85-person U.S. sales force.

Visa and Edify will co-develop streamlined offerings that provide banks with turnkey product solutions and prenegotiated contract terms and prices. Edify will connect to Visa Interactive processing centers via the Access Device Messaging Standard (ADMS) bill payment interface. Edify also plans to implement ADMS extensions that will tie into the VISA e-Pay system. Edify's support for e-Pay will allow consumers to electronically connect through their financial institutions to billing organizations and view and pay bills as part of a single transaction.

Meanwhile, M&I Data Services (Milwaukee, Wis.), a provider of financial services and software, has licensed Electronic Workforce software for its service bureau as a strategic telebanking platform. This agent-based system will initially support service bureau call volumes projected to reach up to an average of 8,000 calls per day, and serving customers who want to check account balances, transfer funds and pay bills.

M&I will deploy an intelligent agent-based solution to electronically deliver such interactive trust services as portfolio holdings information, portfolio activity information and employee benefit plan information. Thanks to the agents, individual account transaction activity can be made available for viewing and file transfer.

To simplify the implementation of intelligent agents throughout financial institutions, Edify has developed the Electronic Banking System, an agent-based application that allows banks to provide automated self-service solutions to their customers (see sidebar).

For instance, Dollar Bank (Pittsburgh, Pa.), plans to use EBS to expand upon the home banking and bill payment services the bank presently offers its customers in western Pennsylvania and northeast Ohio. "This is a natural extension of our telephone banking service," explained Joseph Smith, Dollar Bank's senior VP of marketing. "An increasing number of our customers want to use the PCs as well as their phones to do their banking. EBS permits us to explore the potential of other electronic delivery options such as the World Wide Web."

In this era of customer dissatisfaction with ever-escalating bank service charges, it remains to be seen how readily they will embrace a new technology that undoubtedly will not come cheap. Nevertheless, given the increased breadth of services possible with intelligent agents, online banking holds the promise of being a consumer trend that may actually benefit the consumer, not just the service provider.