Executive interview: Miles Hillier, NatWest

Building up skills

Looking at how the AI-enabled Cora virtual assistant was developed, Hillier says: “As the market for AI and chatbots increased, we looked at how we would build up an AI team. IBM has huge credibility in AI and its tech holds up very well, but one of the myths of AI is that you plug it in and off it goes…the tech takes care of everything.”

But in his experience, the opposite is true. NatWest needed to build out  a team to run and manage the system. This has involved developing a team of highly skilled engineers, who, says Hillier, can get the best out of the IBM cloud and support tools, continuous integration and deployment and Red Hat OpenShift.

Beyond the IT infrastructure to support AI, Hillier says: “We have conversational analysts who look at the data and determine how to make insights. How many different ways can you say the same thing? What is the query about?” To provide the best possible answer, the conversational analysts need to look at intents, he says. 

Building such a team is not necessarily only about classic science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) skills and hiring software engineers. For Hillier, a key strength is people who are able to talk to the customer. This means that some of his team have transitioned from a branch of the contact centre, where they previously had daily conversations with customers.

The ability to learn customer intents from NLP via the Cora virtual assistant is an ongoing process, and the mass adoption of new technology makes this even more difficult. For instance, NatWest is looking at how customer intents change when they interact over a touchscreen user interface on a mobile phone and what happens in the voice environment of the call centre.

Hillier says the bank is also considering the role of smart speakers in online banking, the connected home, connected car and how the advent of 5G connectivity and always-on technology will change how customers chat with brands.

“We did a Google Home pilot in 2019,” he says. “Following on from the pilot, we have now introduced features to our own IVR [interactive voice response] service to help on specific queries.”

NatWest is also working on voice-based biometrics and text-to-speech, where the Cora virtual assistant can be used in the IVR system to pick up and understand the intent of customers calling the contact centre. While the NatWest virtual assistant is effectively a chatbot, the bank is also looking at future developments.

Going forward, Hillier sees a world where virtual humans have the ability to interpret facial experience. In 2017, NatWest began piloting  so-called “digital human” technology from New Zealand-based company Soul Machines. The company’s founder, Mark Sagar, won awards for his ground-breaking facial technology in the films King Kong and Avatar.

Soul Machines’ technology detects human emotion and is able to react verbally as well as physically, through facial expressions. Like humans, it is trained when dealing with new subject matter and can learn from mistakes, so that, over time, the interactions become increasingly accurate.

Asked about the role of online banking in the metaverse, Hillier says that because it is not just Silicon Valley companies developing in the metaverse, “we need to be in places where our customers want us to be”.

And if Christmas purchases are anything to go by, people are buying Oculus Rift virtual reality headsets, which suggests they will be visiting the metaverse. “The key question is: what is the reason to go into an alternative reality?” says Hillier. Looking at current virtual reality games, he adds: “The highly immersive games people play around the world end when you put your headset down.”

While online banking in the metaverse is still very much a bit of a novelty, as and when people start making virtual purchases in that environment, banks like NatWest will inevitably need to develop a virtual presence to support them.