Kate, UBB’s smart assistant, won the first prize in the In-house Solutions category at the Digitalk&A1 Awards 24 competition. She competed with 44 projects in the digital innovations domain, gathered in this year’s edition of the prestigious competition, while at the final she managed to win the prize in the category over the projects of the other two banks.

Kate is a personal digital assistant in the UBB Mobile app, which thoroughly changes the model of rendering banking services to customers. She has been developed based on modern AI technologies and provides 24/7 personalized service in a digital environment, through a constantly self-learning artificial intelligence and usage of data.

Kate is a common assistant for the KBC Group companies, and Bulgaria is the first country, after Belgium, where the assistant has been launched and “taught” to speak the local language. The work on the project started in May 2021. She officially started servicing the Bank’s customers in February 2022, quickly gained popularity and two years later attracted 84% of the UBB mobile banking app users, while the number of conversations with the digital assistant reaches 2 800 000.

„Every client, who logs in the UBB Mobile app, can use her services 24/7. Kate is a digital version of the customer experience at a branch of the bank, where you are being greeted by an employee, ready to answer your questions. The Bank has full control over the quality and completeness of the provided answers and constantly enhances the digital assistant’s autonomy.“, shared Tatyana Ivanova, Executive Director Digitalization, Data and Operations at UBB and Innovation Leader of KBC Group in Bulgaria.

In the opinion of Elena Nasalevska, General Manager Digital Channels and Kate, who received the prestigious award on UBB’s behalf - Kate is proactive, personalized and autonomous, and in most cases a customer can obtain the desired service within one conversation only: „The assistant is being developed by a small team of highly qualified professionals and is a fully automated process on an optimum infrastructure“.  

For two years now Kate has been making it easier for the Bank’s clients to find the most suitable digital service in the UBB’s mobile banking app. The digital assistant helps in both routine situations and in more complicated cases. With its help, for instance, a customer may block his/her card, if lost, see an overview of his/her income and expenses and others

Kate constantly evolves, trains herself and adds new functionalities. At the end of Y2022 she started speaking in a human voice. As of 2023 the digital assistant is already accessible for the Bank’s business customers, too. Over time she acquires more and more skills of being proactive to customers - Kate can offer them different types of banking, insurance, pension insurance and investment products, travel insurance immediately before travel and others. Kate also informs about important events, such as expiring validity of a card, e-vignette or an insurance policy, a pending utility bill, individual and promotional offers.

„Presently we have been working on how to make Kate able to perform certain transactions by instruction of the customer. Soon UBB is going to offer for the first time on the Bulgarian market, payments, fully based on voice instructions. Thus we will save the effort to fill out the payment order requisites, by shifting this task to the customer’s personal assistant Kate.“ – outlined the digital assistant’s development path the Innovation Leader of KBC Group in Bulgaria.

“Our strategic goal is Kate to bring all channels into a single one, framing the vision of digital banking of the future - a new super channel combining direct and end-to-end processes ensuring digital sales, customer experience and consultation in the different phases of the customer journey”, Elena Nasalevska added.

The DigitalK&A1 Awards competition is being organized by Digitalk.bg - the technology mass medium of Capital Weekly, Economedia and A1 Bulgaria. The ceremony on presenting the prizes for digital and sustainable business transformation for 2023 was held on Tuesday, 14.05.2024, in Sofia Event Centre.