Sterling National Bank Partners With IPsoft’s Amelia®–Most Human AI™–to Launch Cognitive Customer Service Agent “Skye”

Skye will use Natural Language Understanding and Artificial Intelligence to automate 3 million contact center inquiries per year

IPsoft, the global leader in enterprise Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Sterling National Bank, the wholly-owned operating bank subsidiary of Sterling Bancorp (NYSE: STL), announced its partnership to deploy Amelia, the industry-leading Digital Employee™. Amelia is set to accelerate Sterling´s digital transformation and provide enhanced customer service. With Amelia, Sterling National Bank aims to heighten customer engagement through its contact centers, reduce high-volume pressures on customer contact agents, and allow bankers to focus on providing unique and personalized service to customers across the business.

Amelia will be used within Sterling National Bank’s Advanced Digital Technology Program, an enterprise strategic initiative to modernize Sterling’s infrastructure and deploy digital technologies that was launched in partnership with Deloitte in 2019. IPsoft’s advanced conversational AI replaces the bank’s traditional interactive voice response (IVR) system to deliver human-like communication and collaboration, allowing Sterling contact center agents to work with Amelia to create superior customer service experiences across multiple channels. The program provides a foundation for continued future growth through a highly scalable operating platform, advancing Sterling’s digital banking capabilities for commercial and consumer clients.

Sterling National Bank is deploying the technology under the name “Skye,” that will be a cognitive AI digital customer service colleague. After first authenticating clients, Skye can provide Sterling customers with information and updates on their account balances and recent transactions, as well as troubleshoot online banking issues, debit card claims and declined card transactions. Skye will be able to scale and resolve more than 50 percent of incoming calls into its contact centers. In addition, Skye will engage 100 percent of incoming customer calls and provide automated self-service for more than 3 million customer calls each year.

Amelia’s advanced machine learning abilities will also allow Skye to constantly evolve and expand its intelligence capabilities with each user experience and interaction. This capability not only increases the accuracy of its responses and ability to manage more voice calls without human agent intervention, but it also informs the responses of a chat solution that Sterling plans to roll out in the near future.

“Given Sterling National Bank’s growth trajectory, it was critical for us to significantly increase our bank’s digital footprint to ensure that both our customers and colleagues continue to have positive experiences and valuable interactions,” said Luis Massiani, Sterling National Bank President. “It was evident from the first time that we experienced Amelia’s capabilities that it would be key in supporting our digital expansion and customer service experience. We’re excited to be launching our very own ‘Skye’ as our Digital Employee that can provide human-like, superior banking experiences with scale and speed.”

“During this challenging period where many bank branches remain closed all across the world, it has never been more important to have a scalable customer service solution to ensure that our limited ability to interact in the physical world doesn’t prevent customers from conveniently managing their banking services,” said Chetan Dube, CEO at IPsoft. “By taking advantage of the scalable and superior digital customer service capabilities of Amelia, Sterling National Bank is assuring its customers that it can support their banking needs no matter where they are — now and in the future.”