ERICA'S EMERGENCE: BANK OF AMERICA'S INVESTMENTS IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SPARKED A FINANCE-INDUSTRY VIRTUAL ASSISTANT THAT COMPETES WITH THE BIG TECH COMPANIES.

• Author: Miller, Harrison

Charlotte-based Bank of America didn't become a dominant megabank without outsized ambition. So if Apple has Siri, Samsung has Bixby, Amazon has Alexa, surely BofA can't stand by and join the dustbin of companies outfoxed by technological advances.

Enter Erica, the bank's virtual assistant that it hopes can revolutionize the mobile-banking experience. The product, named after the last six letters of the bank's name, rolled out nationwide in June 2018. By the end of 2019, more than 10 million of the bank's 29 million mobile users were utilizing the service to answer lots of simple questions--and a few complex ones--about their accounts and finances.

In less than two years, Erica has been used more than 100 million times and helped BofA establish credibility as it competes with tech industry giants that are edging into financial services.

Erica and the other assistants incorporate artificial intelligence to perform various functions, making for a valuable advance as business and society become more reliant on data and technology. BofA has emerged as a tech leader in banking, though its number of mobile users trails JPMorgan Chase, which has 37 million users, Forbes reported in December.

McLean, Va.-based Capital One Financial has introduced a virtual assistant called Eno, while other large companies such as Wells Fargo and Ally Financial rely on products known as chatbots that don't perform as many functions as BofA's offering.

Erica makes it easier for customers to navigate functions offered through the bank's app including changes to credit scores, refund confirmations, spending snapshots and balance predictions. Service is targeted based on individual spending patterns, income and other details scooped up in data searches and massaged through artificial-intelligence technology.

BofA got serious about developing a virtual assistant in 2016, says Christian Kitchell, AI solutions executive and head of Erica. Based in New York and a co-founder of a big data market-research company, he joined BofA's Merrill Edge business in 2013.

The bank saw the advances that Amazon and other tech leaders were making with their Al-powered assistants and realized there were ways it could be applied to financial services to aid customers, Kitchell says.

Through focus groups and deliberation with clients, BofA concluded an assistant would help achieve three key goals: reducing debt, avoiding surprises such as upcoming bills or overdrawing from an account, and...