Customer Service Tech Unicorn Glia Acquires Banking Conversational AI Startup Finn AI
Customer relations management AI startup Glia has acquired financial industry chatbot platform Finn AI for an undisclosed sum. Glia plans to augment its AI-powered customer service with Finn’s banking-focused virtual assistants, a vertical attracting a lot of attention from conversational AI developers even as the number of AI customer service platforms continues to mushroom.
Glia Financial AI
Glia provides clients with a customer service AI across text, voice, and video platforms. The company’s conversational AI for voice and text is an outgrowth of the advisor AI for customer service agents developed by the company to give the best of human adaptability and social skills boosted by AI memory and algorithmic thinking. The AI has helped with more than 10 billion interactions, with the data reused for machine learning algorithm training for continuous improvement of the AI’s interactions and advice. Glia serves a range of industries but began with the financial services space, counting more than 250 finance institutes as clients. The Finn acquisition will help expand Gila’s efforts in that regard. . The money will also aid Glia in reaching more multinational customers.
“Generic’ one-size-fits-all’ bot providers have largely failed to meet the full potential of conversational AI, leading to the emergence of vendors focusing on specific industry verticals. Until now, none of the financial services bot vendors have been able to achieve widespread adoption on their own,” Glia CEO Dan Michaeli said. “Glia’s large and rapidly growing customer base, combined with solid financial backing to accelerate the pace of innovation, immediately brings that scale. Finn AI is a strong fit for Glia based on its technology, market approach and company culture.”
Financial Planning
There’s a lot of interest in combining financial services and conversational AI. Glia raised $45 million earlier this year, reaching more than $1 billion in value on that premise. It’s the same reason enterprise AI platform Gupshup bought Active.ai and its finance-focused portfolio and why investors wrote an $85 million check for financial AI startup Personetics. Banks are adopting AI at a rapid clip as well. Wells Fargo launched a virtual assistant last year, following in the footsteps of U.S. Bank, which has a voice assistant for its mobile app. And Bank of America’s virtual assistant, Erica, is now enormously popular, tripling interactions over the last year to 104.6 million. Credit unions are experimenting with AI too. Wisconsin’s Landmark Credit Union began working with conversational AI platform Clinc to create a virtual assistant, and Minnesota’s Wings Financial Credit Union started to work with Nuance to add voice AI and vocal biometric security to its customers.
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