Our solution is based on three pillars:

The rising popularity of text messaging applications among users of digital products, which convinces us that the dialogue text-based interfaces are the future: fast, familiar and intuitive. The use of intelligent assistant robot with semantic search and natural language processing technology. (Like Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Google Now, or Alexa of Amazon Echo.) The availability of open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), that banks in Europe will be forced to provide for third parties after passing of the second Payment Services Directive (PSD2) by the European Union Commission on 8 October 2015. APIs are standards of direct communication between various pieces of software, for example between banks and retailers systems. This is important not only for financial institutions, but for e-commerce as well.

Conversational banking: the new UI

In the old times user interface of a bank was the bank teller at the branch. From today’s perspective it was inconvenient and time consuming, but the bank had a human face.

Now we are interacting with our banks by clicking on links, menus, and buttons, and filling out forms. But banking apps are often hard to use, overly complex and ugly. Lack of true customer-centricity and technological debt on the back-end side of things make the banking experience frustrating.

How can we make digital banking easier, more simple, more personal and human? By giving it a new face: of a robot!

Meet BankBot. It is the new digital bank teller, personal assistant, and a financial advisor. When you sign in to your K2 Bank account BankBot will greet you and ask for orders.

The main interface of K2 Bank is instantly familiar if you ever used Slack (over two millions of people use it in the office everyday), or Facebook Messenger, or an SMS app, or IRC (then you’re really old school!). It’s never ending stream with history of communications from bottom (recent) to the top (oldest) of the screen.

You type your command or question, and BankBot will answer. BankBot understands natural language, but it pays special attention for keywords, that will trigger actions, like a new transfer or searching in history, or credit card cancellation.