Virtual-Banking-Assistant

IBM GRM Project

Topic: How AI can solve some of the problems posed by Covid.

The COVID-19 pandemic is considered as the most crucial global health calamity of the century and the greatest challenge that humankind faced since the 2nd World War. In December 2019, a new infectious respiratory disease emerged in Wuhan, Hubei province, China and was named by the World Health Organization as COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019). A new class of coronavirus, known as SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2) has been found to be responsible for occurrence of this disease. As far as the history of human civilization is concerned there are instances of severe outbreaks of diseases caused by a number of viruses. According to the report of the World Health Organization (WHO as of April 18 2020), the current outbreak of COVID-19, has affected over 2164111 people and killed more than 146,198 people in more than 200 countries throughout the world. Till now there is no report of any clinically approved antiviral drugs or vaccines that are effective against COVID-19. It has rapidly spread around the world, posing enormous health, economic, environmental and social challenges to the entire human population. The coronavirus outbreak is severely disrupting the global economy. Almost all the nations are struggling to slow down the transmission of the disease by testing & treating patients, quarantining suspected persons through contact tracing, restricting large gatherings, maintaining complete or partial lock down etc.

The COVID-19 pandemic has left its impact on every industry, especially on the global economy and financial sector. Bank helplines are receiving a lot of calls with general queries regarding loans, mortgages, bank charges, etc. which keeps the helpline and helpline agents occupied.

Our Solution

Therefore, to reduce the workload and save time for customers and helpline agents we have created a COVID-19 Virtual Banking Assistant using technologies such as Watson Assistant for leveraging the chatbot and IBM Cloud for connecting Web Application UI to Watson Assistant.