Developed in collaboration with CogniCo - a graduate from the bank's startup accelerator programme - Emma interprets questions asked by customers and answers them in plain English. 

With human-like conversational skills, Emma mimics the actions of a human loans advisor, asking leading questions to understand the query better, while performing on-the-spot calculations for loan approvals.

The bank says more than 10% of the 20,000 chat sessions conducted so far have been converted into mortgage loan sales prospects.

If consumers wish to speak directly to OCBC Bank’s mortgage specialists, Emma will ask for their contact details and forward the information to the human advisor along with the chat logs of her conversations with the customer.

Based on the feedback obtained during each chatbot session, OCBC says nine out of 10 consumers were satisfied with the assistance rendered by the bot. 

Phang Lah Hwa, head, consumer secured lending, OCBC Bank, says: “With a higher acceptance of virtual assistants in recent years, service-oriented chatbots are a natural progression to giving consumers better access to basic details about home loans. The response from both our staff and the consumers has been very encouraging and, as Emma continues to ‘learn’, we are confident that chatbots will be an even more integral part of OCBC’s frontline service team in the near future.”