Chatbots Showing Signs Of Becoming Main Banking Engagement Tool

Significant investment and advances in technology like generative AI indicate that U.S. banks are looking to build chatbots as their primary means of customer engagement.  

According to Curinos’ Digital Banking Analyzer, since 2022, successful response rates have gone up across the market by 8.3 percentage points. At the same time, activation response types – in which an entire query is resolved within a chatbot – has risen from 11.0% to 15.5% while prompts handled by informative responses – i.e., telling the user what to do – have surged from 0.7% to 8.6% (Figure 1). 

But a sizeable share of the market using chatbots still fails to support the user, with intents not understood or the bot not able to address them. Navigational response types, in which the user is directed out of the chatbot to complete the task, have dropped, but only marginally, from 37.4% to 33.7%. And the number of users being diverted to live chat has remained consistent between 2022-2024. (Bank of America and Wells Fargo, with Erica and Fargo, respectively, are the notable exceptions.)  

Still, it’s clear that banks want their chatbots to be considered much more than a support tool or glorified search function. These include everything from move money and payment journeys to alerts, budget setting, account opening and sales. It seems engagement through more sophisticated chatbot functionality is only a matter of time.