Bud Financial launches Bud.ai, a generative AI platform for hyper-personalized banking

AI-driven financial platform Bud Financial (Bud) today announced the launch of Bud.ai, a generative AI platform that aims to empower banks and financial services organizations to enhance their customer engagement. 

According to the company, the latest advancement is an improved logic core that generates real-time insights for consumer and corporate users. Bud.ai aims to enable developers, marketers and risk professionals to integrate profound financial insights into their workflows, enhancing customer engagement through meaningful hyper-personalization and matching consumers with the right financial products.

The company asserts that by integrating its large language model (LLM) technology, financial services organizations can unlock the potential of their vast amounts of unstructured data, gaining clearer insights into individual financial positions or a detailed view of a bank’s portfolio, all through a single integration.

Bud also announced that it is expanding its product suite further with Jas, a product built upon the Bud.ai core, that will offer a personalized generative chat interface, giving consumers access to a fully trained AI assistant. 

Bud claims the assistant is adept at aiding various facets of the financial journey, from pinpointing suitable credit products to offering financial planning guidance.

“Bud has developed foundational language models using banks’ first-party transaction data and consumer-permissioned, third-party open banking data over the years. [With] the new logic core on top of the existing language models, Bud.ai generates real-time insights for consumer and corporate users,” Ed Maslaveckas, founder and CEO of Bud, told VentureBeat. “Our new generative AI assistant, Jas, helps consumers and banks make sense of their financial data through conversation.”

Bud said that the enhanced AI core is now the backbone of its two flagship products: Assess, a lending and affordability solution, and Engage, a money management and personalization solution. 

“Clients using Engage have seen a 20% increase in overall engagement within their applications and, in some instances, a 20% increase in the likelihood to take out a new product on their platform,” Bud’s Maslaveckas told VentureBeat. “Likewise, when utilizing Assess, our clients have seen up to an 80% increase in operational efficiency when processing new loan applications, along with a 20% reduction in missed loan payments.”

Leveraging generative AI for transactional data intelligence

Maslaveckas claims that Bud’s LLM technology will greatly aid financial institutions in converting extensive unstructured data into a transparent portfolio overview, allowing for granular analysis of individual financial positions.

“It enables truly data-driven decision-making and helps to communicate the right product, to the right customer, at the right time. Moreover, it enables financial services leaders to see signs of potential delinquency before they happen so that they can protect against lost revenue,” he explained. “We have integrated Bud.ai over our existing product sets so our clients can begin using it easily through a set of APIs. In the next six months, our clients will be able to also access these products through a no-code solution.”

The company said its new generative chat interface, Jas, uses Google’s PaLM 2 LLM, allowing the platform to give consumers transactional data intelligence and intuitive insights through conversational AI programs.

“Through Jas, users gain personalized recommendations and guidance regarding credit products, financial planning and other monetary concerns. The integration of Google’s PaLM 2 language model ensures that the chat interface adeptly comprehends and processes natural language queries, resulting in an intuitive user experience,” said Maslaveckas. “By merging advanced AI technology with transactional data intelligence, our goal is to provide invaluable assistance to users, enabling them to navigate their finances confidently and lucidly.”

Maslaveckas added that Jas could function as an “action-bot,” fostering customer engagement by extending recommendations and carrying out tasks on customers’ behalf.

“The challenge today is making sure the actions that go live protect the customer, so setting and adjusting simple budgets and savings goals will most likely be first out of the gate,” he said. “In addition, we see great opportunities to improve overall operational efficiency. By partnering with Bud, financial institutions can deliver proven front-of-the-market solutions without the risk of expensive internal R&D expenditure that lacks guaranteed results.”

What’s next for Bud? 

Bud said that it ensures the reliability and security of its generative AI capabilities through dedicated product and technical efforts that prioritize data security and ethics. 

The company said it ensures its commitment to responsible AI development by furnishing dependable and secure generative AI capabilities that uphold the integrity of sensitive financial data. It achieves this by implementing measures and protocols designed to safeguard customer information.

Maslaveckas highlighted the company’s forthcoming objectives, which include developing potential expansion avenues for Bud.ai and associated AI products. He said the focus will remain on incessantly refining Bud’s AI to cater to lenders and customers, augmenting financial wellbeing, and broadening credit accessibility.

“We are exploring the development of specialized AI solutions tailored for specific areas such as risk management, fraud detection and customer support, with the ultimate goal of driving operational efficiency and customer/client outcomes,” Maslaveckas told VentureBeat. “We also look forward to the continued growth and evolution of our partnership with Google, a world-class partner to pave the future of financial services with.”