Tinkoff's chatbot specializes in the fight against fraud

FACTS

• In August 2019, Tinkoff announced the launch of its chatbot named Oleg, positioned as an everyday assistant for its customers. The bank then adopted a somewhat offbeat strategy by choosing to market it so that third parties could integrate its technology.

• Today, the Russian bank is moving towards an operational launch for Oleg, which is also getting a specialization: the Lifestyle assistant is becoming an assistant in the fight against spam and fraud.

• Oleg is now available in a new beta version, called Defender Oleg, for all customers of Russian mobile operators.

• The chatbot will now be able to help its users avoid spam, unwanted calls, intrusive marketing approaches and, more generally, all unwanted approaches and other commercial solicitations by third parties.

• In addition to traditional communication services (email and phone), Oleg will also protect its users on the social networks Telegram and VKontakte.

• How does it do?
  • Oleg can answer, record and transcribe calls or messages from suspicious contacts or unknown numbers.
  • It then activates specific conversation scripts to analyze the fraud or spam risk of these contacts.
  • It then filters out fraudsters and spammers without requiring user intervention.

• Currently, Oleg can respond to over 100 different call scenarios.

CHALLENGES

• Strengthen a unique positioning: Tinkoff Bank has always claimed to be a technology player, rather than a financial player. It therefore adopts the same strategy as the Big Tech companies by marketing its technology to third parties.

• This choice is also in line with Tinkoff's stated strategy of offering a Super-app. To this end, the bank relies on its proprietary voice recognition technologies (Tinkoff VoiceKit), which enable it to navigate fluidly between voice and text conversations to propose adapted responses according to the cases detected.

• Valuing an expertise linked to its core business: The fight against fraud and the securing of exchanges is part of the expertise specific to the banking business. By unveiling a new and technologically advanced service in this field, based on machine learning, Tinkoff also enhances its competitive advantage.

MARKET PERSPECTIVE

• Tinkoff Mobile subscribers have been able to use Oleg services since December 2019. The new version of Defender Oleg available to all Russian mobile subscribers has been under development since March 2020: it has been trained on more than 110 million calls.

• Oleg becomes a life assistant in the broadest sense, capable of protecting personal data and ultimately even, the peace of mind of its users thanks to its Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies.