In March 2025, Sparda-Bank München migrated to a new IT system in an effort to improve its digital services and ensure its banking infrastructure is fit for the future. For customers, this move brought changes including a new online banking system, new apps and a different PIN-related processes. In anticipation of an increase in support requests around the go-live date, the bank deployed a specially trained AI-powered voice chatbot to relieve the pressure on its call center team and offer customers swift support.
Planned IT migration with increased demand for customer support
AI solution: Voice chatbot relieves pressure on Sparda-Bank München call center
With around 258,000 members and roughly 350,000 customers, Sparda-Bank München is Bavaria’s largest cooperative bank. The financial services institution combines traditional banking business with modern online services, assisting its members and customers in person at over 30 branches.
- Concept design and development of a voice chatbot
- Integration of the chatbot with the telephony provider
- Project management
- Testing and implementation of the AI solution
- Support after the go-live
The challenge
Seeking a new strategic direction for its digital IT infrastructure, Sparda-Bank München decided to replace its previous IT provider. This meant numerous changes that would also affect customers: a new online banking system, new approval procedures, a new banking app and, eventually, new credit cards. The bank’s call center team did not have the capacity to handle the volume of support requests anticipated following the migration. In response, the bank sought to introduce an automated solution to offer support, dealing in particular with onboarding customers to the new online banking system, as a way to efficiently handle the expected wave of customer calls.
The bank considered at an early stage how to ensure high availability and effective support for customers, especially in the period immediately after the IT migration – and began to explore the possibility of an AI-powered solution.
The solution
- Cognigy VoiceAI
- Azure Speech-to-text / Text-to-speech Software Development Kit (SDK)
- GPT-4.o
Lufthansa Industry Solutions (LHIND) collaborated with the AI specialists at Futurised GmbH in Hamburg to design and develop its first AI voice chatbot, “KIM”. Besides responding to general queries, the bot needed to guide customers step by step through the process of setting up the new online banking system as well as the new approval procedure. An important requirement was providing a natural user experience in which interactions feel intuitive for customers rather than robotic.
The AI chatbot, which was specifically trained to handle issues related to the new online banking system, was integrated with the telephony provider and thus able to answer telephone calls directly. The chatbot first converts the callers’ speech into text. before the underlying language model generates appropriate responses. These text responses are then converted back into speech. This way, customers receive helpful answers in a matter of seconds over the phone.
Particular challenges in this VoiceAI project included the short turnaround time of just two months and the need to train the AI chatbot to handle different dialects for optimal speech recognition. The first step was testing a range of speech recognition models and comparing the results. The software chosen for the project, Azure SDK, was comprehensively trained by technology partner Cognigy with additional word variants, lexicons and phonetic amendments in order to better understand the intent behind customers’ queries.
Communication agency HMC Hamburg Media Company provided support with user guidance and content. For instance, HMC designed dedicated and intuitive user flows to guide users through the onboarding process, and developed structured datasets to ensure optimal processing by system components. In addition, HMC assisted the LHIND team by performing structured testing to optimize the bot’s responses, making them more consistent and user-friendly while also integrating the bank’s standard tone of voice.
Customer benefits
The voice chatbot KIM went live on the same day as the IT system migration and answered almost 10,000 calls in the first two days. This ensured seamless customer support during and after the migration. It also significantly relieved the pressure on the call center team, as KIM was able to resolve the majority of customer queries. This allowed the call center team to concentrate on more complex cases, where human support was either necessary or explicitly requested by customers.
At the same time, as the bank’s first AI-powered chatbot, KIM marks a further step forward in the digital transformation of Sparda-Bank München. In the future, KIM could be used in other scenarios and deployed by other Sparda-Banks.
- Seamless customer support ensured during IT migration
- Call center team not overburdened on go-live date
- High availability achieved, delivering a positive experience for customers, who received swift assistance and answers
- Future-ready AI automation solution suitable for use in other scenarios