Sparda-Bank Hamburg

The telephone banking portal developed by SemanticEdge for the Sparda-Bank in Hamburg, featuring some 50 automated dialog services, is one of the most innovative and all-encompassing spoken dialog banking applications at use in the world today.

This application was honored with the VOICE Award as the best German-language branch solution. The fully automated services comprise external and internal bank transfers, account balance and turnover inquiries, declaration of bonus points and release orders, the suspension of PIN-codes and credit cards, ordering forms, changing PIN numbers, call handling for employees who are named or to a department, the statement of bank identification codes, branch and ATM locations, and much more.

Sparda-Bank Hamburg

Some of the special features of the application include:

  • A central entry portal and a higher degree of automation: The voice portal is the central entry point for all calls to the Sparda-Bank Hamburg. It answers the majority of the calls to the bank and automates some 75% of them. This distinguishes it clearly from the purely telephone banking systems of the competition, which cannot be activated as a company portal since they can only understand and accommodate banking services.
  • Flexible, Event-Driven Dialoging: Instead of a static menu à la “Say ‘Account Balance‘ if you...“, it gives the caller the initiative with “How can I help you?“. The caller can then immediately select the desired service in whole sentences. The system adapts the dialog dynamically in accordance with the customer's statements or with the stored domain knowledge (available accounts, account balances, overdraft credits, bank transfer limits, etc.)
  • 100% Speech Synthesis: The application consists 100% of speech synthesis, making it the first portal in the German-language territory relying exclusively on TTS. With this, SemanticEdge possesses an enormous know-how advantage over the competition in the implementation of speech synthesis, since we know from years of experience how statements are best constructed and tuned with speech synthesis.
  • Large Vocabulary in Speech Recognition: For the service providing information on the location of branch offices and ATMs, the speech portal allows recognition of every locality name in northern Germany and all of the street names in Hamburg (some 25,000 street names) in a single dialog step. This makes usage very comfortable and easy for the customers.
  • Fully Automated External Bank Transfer: This is the first system worldwide to allow fully automated external bank transfers, including the registration of the recipient's name and a free choice of reason-for-payment with no post-processing. Reason-for-payment can consist of up to 54 alphanumerical spaces. The degree of automation is over 80%!
  • Link to Lotus Notes: In call handling to a specific bank employee, the Lotus Notes system is integrated to check whether the desired person is present. This enables online consideration of whether transferring the call to the employee makes sense. Alternative contact persons can also be suggested immediately.