BelgiumFinance and insurance2020 – ongoingKBC Group
Kate digital assistant
KBC's in-app assistant Kate held 2.36 million conversations in six months and later handled 600,000+ queries a month
Problem
The Belgian bank-insurer wanted to answer banking and insurance questions in its mobile app at any hour and to make timely, personal suggestions, without sending every request to contact-centre staff.
Approach
KBC launched Kate in KBC Mobile for private customers in Belgium and the Czech Republic in November 2020, covering banking, insurance and some third-party services by chat and voice. Kate passed customers to human colleagues when it could not help, and the bank offered an 'Advanced Kate' option that sends proactive suggestions. Kate was extended to other group markets and, by 2025, described as running on large language models and sending more than 1.3 million proactive nudges a month.
Results
Takeaway
After six months Kate understood 90% of questions but often could not link them to a solution; 30% of conversations led to an action and 12% were handed to staff. KBC's later figures measure queries handled, so they cannot be compared directly with early conversation counts.
Categories
- Size
- Large enterprise
- Industry
- Finance and insurance
- Business function
- Customer serviceMarketing and sales
- Innovation type
- Product and service innovationProcess innovation
- Adoption
- Built in-house
- Evidence
- Company's own claim
Sources
Source summaries
By the end of April 2021, six months after launch, about 781,000 customers had used Kate in some 2.36 million conversations, according to KBC. It reports that 30% of conversations led to further action and 12% were passed to a KBC Live colleague. Kate understood 90% of questions but could not always link them to a solution, and 24% of proactive proposals under 'Advanced Kate' were accepted.
A KBC Insurance executive said the bank launched Kate as a minimum viable product and had to retrain it on basic questions that staff had assumed were obvious. Insurance topics that customers rarely raised were difficult to train for. The executive said Kate increased customer interactions without friction with branches.
KBC described Kate as a multilingual assistant powered by large language models in its submission to the Qorus-Infosys Finacle Banking Innovation Awards 2025. It said Kate handles more than 600,000 queries and sends over 1.3 million nudges a month.
Full details are in the original sources.
