Robo Advisor
Problem
A life insurance company owned by a large bank wanted to scale high-quality financial advice to its entire customer base. The time and cost involved in training and accrediting top - notch financial advisors made this vision seem near impossible. It quickly became apparent that the only way to solve this was by way of an Al-powered digital financial advisor.
Solution
BusinessOptics collaborated closely with the FNB Life team to build a tool that assessed customers' circumstances and goals, simulated their income statements and balance sheets into the future under different risk scenarios, calculated their insurance needs and helped them balance affordability with attaining coverage. It provided support and guidance to sales intermediaries, as well as a common platform for self-service digital advice. Detailed analytics and reporting ensured early detection of usability and operational problems and highlighted the significant positive business impact across a range of key metrics, such as average premium and persistency. The team won multiple innovation awards for the solution, which was a first of its kind in the industry.
Merchant trading solution
Problem
Merchants trading in the informal economy in various African countries are considered uncreditworthy in the eyes of most banks. This is as a result of the lack of an accessible credit history that can be used to underwrite risk. Consequently, a large portion of the African business community is excluded from accessing much-needed working capital and growth capital.
Solution
BusinessOptics worked together with Standard Bank and fintech Nomanini to leverage alternative data sources to build credit models in support of real-time lending to these merchants. The data was, furthermore, used to profile merchant behaviour and power a tailored communication strategy to enhance adoption and risk management.
Agri Solution
Problem
Agriculture constitutes 25% of the Ugandan economy and 80% of Ugandan farmers are small-scale farmers. These farmers struggle with access to capital to procure the necessary inputs, such as quality seed and fertilizer, as well as access to mechanisation services. Furthermore, cashflow constraints when significant expenses are owing, such as school fees, can lead to poor agricultural decisions on the part of the farmer.
Solution
Working with Standard Bank, other local startups and cooperatives, Business Optics helped create risk underwriting models through mapping farms, collecting on - the ground farming data and synthesising this with remote sensing data , such as satellite and radar data. These models allowed Standard Bank to advance inputs to farmers and fund mechanisation, which collectively drive higher yields for farmers and free up cash for funding family expenses.
Financial services chatbot
Problem
A large retailer provides a range of financial services products. The call centre was the primary channel for customer engagement, despite a large shift in the preference of their customer base to interact via digital messaging channels. From customer experience and cost perspectives, the business could benefit from a transition to an intelligent messaging-first mode of engagement across customer service, sales, collections and fraud management
Solution
BusinessOptics worked with our client to roll out an intelligent platform leveraging natural language processing to automate conversations with customers. The solution was first successfully initiated in the collections area of the business. Expansion into other areas of the business is underway, where foundations are being laid to mass personalise much of the engagement via an embedded reinforcement learning framework.
Customer data unification and cross-sell via CRM
Problem
A Mauritian insurance company offered multiple lines of products across eight different systems. It wanted the ability to cross-sell to customers, but had no single view of a customer allowing them an overview of the various products that a particular customer might possess.
Solution
BusinessOptics leveraged the Dataseed customer unification product to consolidate customer records across the organisation and expose these via an API. These were pulled into a machine learning cross-sell which fed into a custom-built CRM system to enable cross-selling across the organisation’s contact centre, branches and agent sales force.
Compliance: KYC, sanctions screening, PEP screening, EDD, Adverse Media and AML
Problem
In rolling out various fintech solutions to customers in Africa who individually cannot support a high cost of servicing, Standard Bank required a scalable and affordable solution to ensure compliance with global anti-money laundering and sanctions screening regulations. Existing solutions required extensive manual interventions, had high false positive rates and were completely unaffordable.
Solution
BusinessOptics helped create a solution to offer real-time affordable compliance solution that effectively managed risk while maximising efficiency using AI. Find out more about the RelyComply solution.