Military members can now converse with their bank accounts, thanks to Ann Arbor company

United Services Automobile Association (USAA) members are now able to converse with their bank accounts, thanks to a 90-day pilot program with Ann Arbor-based artificial intelligence (AI) company Clinc.

Clinc was founded in 2015 by Jason Mars and Lingjia Tang, both University of Michigan professors specializing in AI and systems research. The company revealed its AI financial assistant, Finie, last fall.

USAA is a major institution offering a variety of financial services, but many people aren't aware of it since it serves military members, says Clinc CEO Mars. Mars says working with USAA is a great fit because the financial institution is consistently ranked No. 1 in customer service and satisfaction.

"That's going to give us a lot of credibility when it comes to having a great customer experience in the industry," Mars says.

As part of the pilot program, Clinc's technology has been integrated with Amazon's Alexa, a virtual personal assistant.

"The Alexa device is translating speech to text, and then that text goes to our AI brain," says Mars. "Our A.I. does the work from there, and the natural language understanding and reasoning happens in our stack, and then sends the response out to Alexa."

Clinc's technology is like no previous chatbot or virtual assistant because it is able to process natural human language. Existing chatbots follow a script, asking what you want to do, then what account you want to change and other iterative steps. In contrast, Clinc's AI understands natural human language, so you can give multiple commands in one sentence, such as: "Change the withdrawal limit in my checking account to $500 and have that end after two months."

Mars says that just a few days after launching the pilot program, many users have signed up and report being "delighted" about the experience so far. Clinc will use the pilot program to learn more about how customers want to use it so the company can tweak its product before a wider launch to all USAA members, Mars says.

Mars adds that Clinc expects to announce more partnerships in a few months, including institutions that are likely to be more familiar household names than USAA.
Interested in learning more about Clinc? Join Concentrate for a High Growth Happy Hour featuring Jason Mars and fellow Ann Arbor entrepreneur Christina York on Aug. 23 at Ann Arbor SPARK. For more details and to RSVP, click here.

Sarah Rigg is a freelance writer and editor in Ypsilanti Township. You may reach her at sarahrigg1@gmail.com.