Trust Bank wants customers to stop searching and start asking

Trust Bank is betting on conversational AI to change how customers interact with their finances, after finding that around 80% of its active customers view and analyse their spending transactions every month.

The insight has led to the launch of 'Trust AI Ask', a new in-app feature that allows customers to search and understand their card spending using everyday language, rather than navigating transaction histories, menus and filters.

Speaking to MARKETING-INTERACTIVE, Naveen Sethia, chief customer officer at Trust Bank, said customers regularly use the bank's app to look up past transactions, verify payments and check spending by category, merchant or date.

While existing search functions can handle these requests, they can require customers to remember specific details or manually work through their transaction history.

"We saw an opportunity to make this experience more intuitive and delightful," he said. "'Trust AI Ask' was developed to bridge that gap by enabling customers to find and understand their transaction information instantly using everyday language, reducing effort and saving time."

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Customers can ask questions such as how much they spent on groceries in a given month, how much they spent on transport or what they spent while overseas. The feature can interpret merchants, categories, dates and spending amounts within a single query, and generate totals, transaction counts and spending summaries where relevant.

Trust said 'AI Ask' is a market-first capability within Singapore's retail banking sector, with its distinction lying in the ability to search and interpret card spending conversationally rather than through traditional filters and keyword searches.

Turning AI into an everyday banking interface

For Trust, however, the feature is part of a broader push to make conversational AI a more natural interface for banking.

The bank previously introduced a GenAI-powered customer service chatbot, which it said now handles more than 50% of customer enquiries end-to-end. AI Ask brings that conversational approach into customers' personal financial information, allowing them to interact directly with their transaction data.

"We see conversational interfaces becoming an increasingly important part of digital banking," Sethia said.

The longer-term ambition, he added, is to use natural conversations not only to help customers retrieve information, but also to understand their finances and eventually receive more personalised and relevant insights.

That expansion also brings a greater focus on trust and transparency. Sethia said the bank will need to clearly communicate what AI Ask does, how it works and what controls are in place, particularly given that customers are using it to interact with personal financial information.

Trust said AI 'Ask' only uses a customer's own transaction information to answer their queries, with privacy and security safeguards in place to protect personal information and filter sensitive data.

The feature is initially being introduced through in-app communications, with Trust planning to explore other ways of demonstrating how customers can use it.

Beyond the customer experience, Trust also expects AI Ask to have an operational impact by allowing customers to resolve routine transaction-related queries themselves, potentially reducing the need for customer service support.

For Trust, that makes 'AI Ask' more than a new search function. It is another step towards making conversational AI part of the everyday banking experience.

The move follows Trust's efforts to make financial management within its app more intuitive and engaging. Last year, the bank introduced "Saving pots", a feature developed based on customer feedback that allows users to create personalised pots and savings targets for different financial goals.

Customers can create up to five pots and use Trust's AutoPay feature to determine how much, when and how often funds are added. At the time, Trust said more than 75,000 savings pots had been created, with emergency funds, travel and dream homes among the most popular savings goals.

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