Insights: Robinhood, Public and the US firms leading the AI customer experience race

**Kate Moody** (0:14)
Hello, and welcome to Fintech Insider Insights. I'm Kate Moody, Customer Strategy Director here at 11FS. Today, we're talking about one of the biggest themes shaping financial services right now, AI-powered customer experiences. Over the past few weeks, the 11FS Pulse team has been researching and benchmarking some of the most interesting AI products and experiences emerging from the US market. Alongside that work, we've also spoken to a couple of the companies building them to better understand the thinking behind their approach.
Throughout today's episode, we'll hear directly from those conversations before unpacking what they tell us about the future of AI in financial services. Joining me today are two colleagues from the 11FS Pulse team who've been leading that research. First up, we have Joe Colchester, Head of Product. Joe, welcome back to Fintech Insider.
Tell our listeners a little bit more about your role at 11FS Pulse. Also, I believe you've been chatting about this topic, not just recently with Inside Pulse, but also Money 2020, right? So, lots of things to cover with you today.

**Joe Colchester** (1:12)
Yeah, thank you so much for having me back.
Yeah, I lead the product at 11FS Pulse. So, I manage the product team and the content team. And yes, I was recently speaking about AI and how best to design AI at Money 2020 And a lot of the kind of themes that we'll be talking about today did come up. It was obviously a huge topic throughout the whole of the convention, but it's very exciting just talking about it today as well.

**Kate Moody** (1:35)
Brilliant. Well, yeah, looking forward to picking your brains as we go through. And alongside Joe, we have Oliwia Wasik, Product Manager and Benchmark Lead also at 11FS Pulse. Oliwia, welcome back to the show. Again, maybe remind our listeners a bit more about what it is precisely you do at 11FS Pulse and maybe some things you've been seeing across the products you've been looking at. Sure. Thank you, Kate. So, I'm a Product Manager and Benchmarking Lead at Pulse. So, what I do is I look under the hood of some of these products and experiences to see what's genuinely good design and what is maybe just AI dressed up for a little demo.
The thing that struck me was that we're adding AI means very different things at different companies and actually, the strongest experiences don't just add AI, but actually start with the question of, okay, how do we solve a problem for our customers?
Maybe the other thing is that the model that people are using is not really the differentiator but rather the car and drives and the controls in place. Interesting. We are definitely excited to explore that a bit more as we go through the conversation. We've got a brilliant team assembled. Let's dive in.
Financial services finds itself in the center of a hype to value cycle, where brands are mobilizing to move beyond simply talking about the potential of AI and onto embedding it into their products and services. But as we know from the shift to digital, a transformation of that scale doesn't happen overnight. That's exactly why AI isn't as prominent across the customer experience as your LinkedIn feed would have you believe. However, there are brands making considerable strides, particularly in the US, and they're going to be the focus of today's show. Joe and Oliwia have crafted a list of their favorite experiences that embrace AI from across the pond, which we're going to go through today. Let's start with Robinhood. We asked them what the core problem they were looking to solve for their customers was. Jordan Sinclair, Robinhood's UK president, answered our questions.

**Jordan Sinclair** (3:28)
For our UK customers, it was making sure that we met their UK needs. I think it's important when you expand, our product started in the US and we've grown to over 27 million customers there, but that doesn't mean your product you can lift and drop and just hope they like it. Spending time with customers before we launched, understanding their pain points. I think in the UK, we heard loud and clear, customers were finding it incredibly difficult to just get easy access to the markets, not pay a ridiculous fee on some of the incumbent providers, but also get access to the market when the news is happening 24-5. In the UK, the 2.3 is when the markets open in the US and nine o'clock that closes, in the middle of your workday, a lot has happened on both sides of those times and the market moves, and for a long time, retail just didn't have access to those moves. I think that's important if you give customers access to be able to trade when markets open which these days is 24.5 and in time, I believe it will be 24.7.