Voice agents for a Swiss private bank's client service line
A telephony-grade agent in Swiss German, French and English that answers, verifies, resolves and hands over — with recording consent handled the way FINMA expects.
- Region
- Switzerland
- Industry
- Financial services
- Engagement model
- Enterprise Retainer
- Duration
- Phased over a defined programme
- Client
- A Swiss private bank
Context
A Swiss private bank serves clients in Swiss German, French and English from a client service line that has grown around relationship managers. Calls arrive at all hours from several time zones; most concern balances, transfers within agreed limits, card and access matters, appointments and documents. Each is answered by a person, which the bank regards as a mark of the institution, and each costs the institution the time of a person who could be advising rather than confirming a balance.
The bank operates under FINMA's expectations on outsourcing and operational risk, under banking secrecy and under the revised Federal Act on Data Protection. Any system that speaks to a client, records the conversation and acts on an account must be explicable to the compliance function before it takes a call, and to the supervisor afterwards. The bank's client data does not leave Switzerland.
The mandate is not to replace the relationship managers. It is to give the service line a first voice that resolves what policy allows, verifies the caller to the level the request requires, records and retains the call the way the supervisor expects, and hands over to a person — with the full context of the call — the moment the request exceeds what the agent may do.
Mandate
The engagement is bought as an Enterprise Retainer: continuous capacity across the voice, AI and engineering practices, planned quarterly, with the service line improving every month rather than being delivered once.
- 01Answer every call on the existing number in the caller's language, with Swiss German recognised and Standard German or the caller's chosen language spoken back.
- 02Resolve, within written policy, the intents that account for most of the line's volume: balances, transfers within limits, card matters, appointments and document requests.
- 03Verify identity at the level each transaction requires, from knowledge-based checks to one-time codes, and record the verification with the call.
- 04Capture recording consent in the form the bank's compliance function approves, retain and delete recordings on the agreed schedule, and keep every recording and transcript inside the Swiss data plane.
- 05Hand over to a relationship manager or the service team from any point in the call, carrying the transcript, the verified identity and the intents so far.
- 06Leave the bank with the conversation designs, the policy specification, the evaluation set and the runbook as its own property, operable by its own team.
Approach
- 01
Discover
Listen to a sample of real calls with the service team present; map intents by volume and by the risk of resolving them without a person; read the recording, consent and retention obligations with compliance; inventory the core banking, card, identity and scheduling systems a resolution must touch and how each is reached today.
- 02
Define
Write the conversation design per language with the bank's own client-service vocabulary; write the policy the agent may act within — which transactions, which limits, which verification level — as a versioned document the compliance function signs; decide the data plane (Swiss region or the bank's own data centre) and record it; build the first evaluation set from consented recordings and synthetic calls per intent and language.
- 03
Build
Integrate telephony with the bank's carrier and its existing queue so that the agent is a front door on the known number with failover to the service team; deploy speech and language models inside the chosen plane; build the policy engine and the integrations to core banking, card and scheduling systems through the bank's integration layer; run the evaluation set on every change and close the penetration and red-team findings before the gate.
- 04
Prove
Route one intent, in one language, for one client segment, with a person reviewing every call; report resolution, handover and quality scores weekly to the steering committee; widen the slice intent by intent and language by language as the numbers hold; obtain compliance sign-off on recording and consent evidence from the pilot before general traffic.
- 05
Operate
Run the monthly improvement cycle under the retainer: quality review, policy and evaluation-set updates, new intents added through the same gates; annual re-test of consent and retention; capability transferred to the bank's own team so that operating the line never depends on Altuon.
What was built
- Telephony front door
- Carrier integration on the bank's existing number, queue integration and failover to the human service team, so no caller is ever without an answer.
- Multilingual speech layer
- Swiss German recognition with Standard German replies, French and English at native quality, and mid-call language switching, deployed inside the Swiss data plane.
- Policy engine
- A rules layer outside the language model that decides what the agent may execute and at which verification level, driven by the compliance-signed policy specification.
- Identity verification
- Knowledge-based checks and one-time codes over a second channel, mapped to transaction risk, with the verification recorded against the call.
- Consent and recording service
- The recording notice per language, consent capture and evidence, retention and deletion on the agreed schedule, and routing to an unrecorded human line where a caller declines.
- Core-system integrations
- Read and write adapters to core banking, cards and scheduling through the bank's integration layer, each with its own contract tests.
- Warm handover
- Transfer to a relationship manager or the service team with transcript, identity and intents attached, from any step of the call.
- Evaluation harness and quality dashboard
- Recorded and synthetic test calls per intent and language run on every release; resolution, handover, latency and quality scores per week with drift alerts.
Outcome
A blueprint measures what the mandate promised. The figures below are the ones this engagement would report to the steering committee; they are filled from the record when a client approves publication, and are otherwise shown as the measures rather than as numbers.
- Share of calls resolved without handover, by intent and language
- Measured against the baseline agreed in the mandate
- Average handling time on the line, against the pre-engagement baseline
- Measured against the baseline agreed in the mandate
- Recording-consent compliance rate across the pilot and general traffic
- Measured against the baseline agreed in the mandate
Timeline
Stack
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