Each to their own font: Commonwealth Bank’s plan to personalise each customer’s apps

The nation’s largest bank will use AI to tailor the mobile apps of each of its 7.7 million customers with different fonts, language, imagery and services.

Commonwealth Bank chief data analyst Andrew McMullan.

Customer of Australia’s largest bank are expected to receive an individualised app experience, thanks to artificial intelligence being integrated to provide a personalised service.

Commonwealth Bank on Wednesday announced it was releasing its app 5.0 which would tailor content to each individual customer, of which the app has about 7.7 million.

The bank’s chief data analyst, Andrew McMullan, said the company had been experimenting with AI in the background, which would eventually create an “experience” during which each individual user saw different fonts, colours, language and imagery in their mobile app.

The app, as demonstrated to CBA’s Reimagining Banking Briefing on Wednesday, would highlight services such as insurance, and show a consumer’s spending habits and progress toward certain tailored goals.

“We‘re leveraging generative AI to make that process more personalised for all of our customers. And eventually across all of the experiences in digital,” Mr McMullan told The Australian.

“It’ll literally be one app for every single customer. It’ll be so personalised with the features and experiences and language and images that individual customers resonate with.”

The shift toward making banking more game-like has been a long time coming, and many banks have opted to replicate social media-like user experiences with transactions.

CBA had been using AI in the background since 2016, and was gradually introducing it across all of its digital services, the bank said.

Asked about the future of the bank’s virtual chatbot Ceba, Mr McMullan said the bank was working toward expanding on the chatbot’s conversation-like ability with a number of new uses such as handling disputes.

“The number of disputes (with online transactions) has increased two times over the last year,” he said.

“When we’ve got issues like that, and more customers needing our help, what we want to do is use AI to focus on helping the customer.”

AI and machine learning was already behind the bank’s benefits finder tool which analysed customers for potential entitlements.

“We’ve got over 1000 machine learning models, and what they’re doing is trying to understand if our customers would benefit from any rebates,” he said.

The next generation of generative AI would be used to encourage a “large proportion” of the bank’s business and consumer customers to take up rebates.

CBA, which in March spruiked discount home loans as perk for technology graduates, sent 74 of the 250 2023 graduates to its data science department to work with and around AI.

“What we know from a lot of research and a lot of other analytics is that when you present an image or language that customers really resonate with, they are much more likely to engage with that particular notification,” Mr McMullan said.

CBA also showed off the use of AI in CommSec, its online share trading platform, would also be fully integrated into the CBA banking app from next month. The platform currently exists as a separate mobile app.