CBA form an exclusive partnership with AI leader H2O.ai

Commonwealth Bank (CBA), Australia’s leading provider of integrated financial services, has announced today an exclusive partnership with H2O.ai

Through this new partnership, CBA has also taken a minority stake in H2O.ai, a global leader in artificial intelligence (AI).

H2O.ai, headquartered in Silicon Valley, operates a cloud-based machine learning (ML) platform, H2O AI Cloud. The company also employs a significant number of the world’s top data scientists.

Now, as H2O.ai’s partners, CBA will provide H2O.ai’s state-of-the-art AI Cloud to its entire organisation. This includes data scientists, data engineers and business users.

Commonwealth Bank CEO, Matt Comyn, said: “The partnership will further differentiate and extend our artificial intelligence capability to better anticipate customer needs, and reimagine products and digital experiences to meet those needs.”

“This partnership will accelerate our ability to deliver a broader customer proposition through more personalised experiences, which delivers greater value for our customers,” he continued.

Building an AI-powered organisation with H2O.ai

Additionally, Commonwealth Bank will gain a dedicated H2O.ai team of experts, including industry-renowned ‘Kaggle Grandmasters’, machine learning engineers and product specialists.

With their expertise, these professionals will work full time on developing new AI solutions within the bank.

H2O.ai Founder and CEO Sri Ambati said: “CommBank and H2O.ai are led by our core belief that we can make the world better while serving our communities and customers with excellence. This strategic partnership between the leading global AI Cloud movement and Australia’s largest bank will unleash the juggernaut of co-innovation in AI for Payments and further democratise AI with trust and freedom. Our vision is not only to make CBA an AI superpower but make Australia an AI nation as we move to life after Covid. This will be fun.”

By partnering, CBA will be able to build an AI-powered organisation to support its customers. With H2O.ai, Commonwealth Bank will be able to improve its customer service by helping customers find personalised and relevant offers to save money. 

The bank will also be able to do this while customers shop across platforms such as Little Birdie, Karta, CommBank Rewards, and Klarna.

CBA and H2O.ai helping customers make better financial decisions

With H2O.ai’s technology, CBA will have the ability to better predict bills and forecast cash flows for both its retail and business customers.

“We are not just helping customers make better decisions about their finances, but also about how they can reduce and offset their energy usage and carbon emissions. We will be using our AI models to orchestrate a range of services available across the CBA ecosystem for customers, including through our own products like the Green Loan to help homeowners finance solar or a battery, or through recently announced partnerships such as Amber Energy and CoGo,” said Dr Andrew McMullan, CBA’s Chief Data & Analytics Officer.

Commonwealth Bank is now H2O.ai’s exclusive financial services partner in Australia and New Zealand. The AI company provides the bank with access to top international talent to assist in working on the bank’s highest value customer needs.

Comyn also commented: “Deepening our existing relationship with H2O.ai enables us to work more closely with some of the world’s best data scientists and will help to attract top talent wanting to work with the best tools on the biggest data sets on the most interesting problems. We see broad application for AI and machine learning technology right across our business – in operational processes, protecting customers from fraud, lending decisions, and risk management. It builds on the foundational data and analytics capabilities that Commonwealth Bank has developed over the past decade.

He concluded: “We aspire to be the trusted partner at the centre of our customers’ financial lives. To do this in an increasingly digital world, artificial intelligence is playing an even more important role in delivering personalised and relevant experiences. When these experiences drive demonstrably better outcomes for customers, this builds trust, confidence, and ultimately engagement – and the more our customers engage with us, the better we are able to anticipate their needs."

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