EVA™ is MENA region's first intelligent voice-based and chatbot Virtual Assistant for banking

Customers will be able to engage with EVA™ using natural or conversational language

EVA™ will enable quicker, simpler, personalized and intuitive customer service

Dubai, 20 November, 2016

Emirates NBD, a leading bank in the region, today announced that it will soon debut ‘EVA™’, the region’s first intelligent voice-based and chatbot Virtual Assistant for banking in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

Emirates NBD Future Lab™, a key initiative of the bank’s digital strategy, is currently piloting EVA™’s voice capabilities via a select customer user group for calls to its customer service centre. The beta version includes chatbot capabilities via the bank’s Facebook messenger, soon to be extended to its popular mobile banking application. The pilot enables the user group to interact and receive assistance from EVA™ using natural or conversational English, offering a more intuitive and personalised customer experience, based on artificial intelligence algorithms.

“EVA™ will soon be an exciting new addition to our customer service toolkit, acting as an intelligent virtual assistant to help customers with their banking needs,” said Suvo Sarkar, Senior EVP & Group Head – Retail Banking & Wealth Management at Emirates NBD. “Leveraging cutting-edge technology, EVA™ will usher a new era of instant customer service via a human-like conversational interface. Activating EVA™ is a part of our over-arching customer-first philosophy to make banking simpler and more convenient through digital innovation.”

According to recent reports by Statista, 43% of mobile voice search users do so because it is quicker than going on a website or using an app. Emirates NBD Future Lab™ is testing implementation of EVA™ as part of the bank’s AED 500 million commitment to digital innovation and multichannel transformation to increase customer loyalty. As virtual assistants like Siri, Cortana, Amazon Echo and others play an increasingly important part of our daily lives, Emirates NBD plans to continue to invest in evolving EVA™’s functionalities to become more engaging and intuitive.

Commenting on the bank’s plans for EVA™, Pedro Cardoso, Head of Multichannel and CRM at Emirates NBD said, “Emirates NBD has always been a step ahead in anticipating customer’s needs and offering simpler banking solutions by leveraging digital innovation.  We recognise that customers today need quicker access to service and EVA™’s intelligent voice and text with natural language recognition capabilities will help us provide a level of engagement never seen before by the region’s banking customers.”  

In the first phase of the pilot, EVA™ will understand the customer’s request and route directly to the appropriate menu solution both via voice and chat, allowing self-service where possible, or routing to a customer service agent to resolve the query. In the near future, EVA™ will transform the traditional way customers interact with the bank, by

offering a true omnichannel experience allowing customers to start a conversation over chatbot and continue via voice across multiple devices, making it much easier and more convenient.

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About Emirates NBD: 
Emirates NBD is a leading banking Group in the region. As at 30th September 2016, total assets were AED 446 Billion, (equivalent to approx. USD 121 Billion). The Group has a significant retail banking franchise in the UAE and is a key participant in the global digital banking industry, with over 90 per cent of all financial transactions and requests conducted outside of its branches. The bank currently has more than 220 branches and over 955 ATMs and CDMs in the UAE and overseas and a large social media following, being the only bank in the Middle East ranked among the top 20 in the ‘Power 100 Social Media Rankings’, compiled by The Financial Brand. It is a major player in the UAE corporate and retail banking arena and has strong Islamic Banking, Global Markets & Treasury, Investment Banking, Private Banking, Asset Management and Brokerage operations. Ratings agency Moody’s recently upgraded the bank’s long-term deposit and senior unsecured ratings to A3 and its baseline credit assessment (BCA) to ba1. In addition to the bank's strong funding and liquidity profile, the upgrade reflected the bank's improved loan quality, and its higher loss-absorption buffers.

The Group has operations in the UAE, Egypt, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Singapore, the United Kingdom and representative offices in India, China and Indonesia.

The Group is an active participant and supporter of the UAE’s main development initiatives and of the various educational, environmental, cultural, charity and community welfare establishments.

For more information, please visit: www.emiratesnbd.com

For further information on Emirates NBD, please contact: 
Ibrahim Sowaidan
Senior Vice President
Head - Group Corporate Affairs
Emirates NBD
Telephone: +971 4 609 4113 / +971 50 6538937
e-mail: ibrahims@emiratesnbd.com

Tricia Kaul | Shaleen Sukthankar
ASDA’A Burson-Marsteller; Dubai, UAE
Tel: 971-4-4507600; Fax: 971-4-4358040
Email: tricia.kaul@bm.com  
shaleen.sukthankar@bm.com

© Press Release 2016