Commonwealth Bank of Australia recently acquired a minority stake in Silicon Valley-based AI firm H2O.ai, in an effort to help the bank improve its banking experience for its customers.
While the actual monetary details of the deal were not disclosed, CBA was the leading investor in H2O.ai’s $100 million Series E growth financing rounding. The bank is also poised to become the exclusive financial services partner for the AI firm in Australia and New Zealand. This will give CBA access to H2O.ai’s AI cloud platform as well as a full team of machine learning engineers who will develop new AI solutions for the bank.
In 2019, CBA launched its banking app, touted as a “world-leading” in machine learning, data analysis and behavioural science. Coinciding with the launch, CBA announced that it would run around 200 machine learning models in addition to 157 billion data sets.
The launch of the app also coincided with the completion of the customer loyalty machine, which the bank has announced will use AI and machine learning to improve the customer experience.
CBA has turned to AI and machine learning technology to eliminate abusive transaction descriptions and automate the cheapest routing for transactions between Eftpos and international systems such as Mastercard and Visa.