AI Chatbots in Banking Apps Resolve Blocked Payments Just 11% of the Time, According to a New Study

A new study by DECTA, a payment infrastructure company, has determined the disconnect between the presence of AI chatbots and their effectiveness in resolving banking app issues.

Based on a survey of 1,506 consumers and an analysis of 159,600 app store reviews of the 10 most-used banking and payment apps in Europe, including Revolut, Monzo, Wise, N26, and Starling Bank, chatbots successfully resolved payment issues in only 11.4% of cases. Half of the users (50%) of these apps had to escalate to a human agent to resolve their issue, while 14.9% of users reported that the chatbot did not ultimately provide any resolution to their issue.

Furthermore, a review of 34,167 one- and two-star app store reviews revealed a 55.49% year-on-year growth in the number of negative reviews blaming the chatbots in these apps.

Of the 1,506 consumers surveyed by DECTA, only 5.4% of users trust AI chatbots to resolve their banking app problems, as compared to 65.2% who trust a human agent. Furthermore, 48% of users who encountered a blocked payment said that the transaction never went through at all, and 10% attempted to complete the transaction on a different banking and financial technology (FinTech) app. A total of 76.3% of users said they encountered the chatbot while experiencing their banking app problem, despite the fact that 56.6% of those users attempted to contact a human agent prior to contacting the chatbot.

What the complaints reveal

Within the review complaints that blamed the banking app chatbots for the users’ problems, 57% of complaints were related to four main categories:

• Identity verification issues (16.85%)
• Declined transactions (16.09%)
• Login and access problems (12.74%)
• Account suspensions (11.23%)

“The whole point of a well-built digital banking platform is that the problems users complain about never reach them in the first place,” said Gabriel Stefanak, Head of Sales at DECTA. “Identity edge cases, account decisions, declined transactions. Those are the moments where infrastructure either does its job or hands the customer to a chatbot that can’t help them.”