Monese partners with Unbabel to support banking without boundaries

Monese, the globally connected banking service for internationally mobile individuals, has announced a partnership with Unbabel to deliver multilingual customer service. Unbabel, the enterprise SaaS company that combines state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence (AI) with the assurance of human translators to break down business communication barriers, will allow Monese customers to communicate with customer support teams in 28 languages.

Recognized as the ‘Best Challenger Bank’ at the 2016 European Fintech Awards, the European mobile banking service provides easily accessible mobile bank accounts, via the Monese app, for internationally mobile individuals. These are the millions of people who live some part of their life in another country – whether it’s for travel, work, business, study, family, or retirement. Appealing to a truly international user base soon after its launch, Monese swiftly realised the need for rapid, clear multilingual communication between its service agents and app users. With its mobile-only dual UK and Euro IBAN current account, its portability across 20 countries, and both the app and its customer service available in 11 languages, Monese allows people and businesses to bank like locals cross the UK and Europe.

Lauri Haav, Head of International Expansion at Monese, commented: “We realized we could make customers’ lives so much easier if we made support for our app accessible in multiple languages. People contact Customer Services in their preferred language, the language they use within the Monese app, and being able to meet their expectations in their preferred language, first time, makes for a more rewarding and higher-quality user experience.”

To increase the linguistic scope of its team without significantly adding to headcount and creating a drain on cost and resource, Monese selected Unbabel’s unique neural machine learning software, which is backed up by a global network of human linguists to eliminate errors. Haav continued: “It became clear quickly that we would need a lot more ‘man-power’ to satisfy the communication needs of our users. Unbabel was the perfect solution for us in terms of usability, cost, and accuracy.”

Unbabel’s software already directly translates 40-45% of customer tickets received, and Monese recently developed its usage further by launching a translation in live chat service, moving on from email-only customer interactions. Communication is received from a customer, translated by Unbabel’s Neural Machine Translation software, and passed to the customer agent. A global network of human translators ensures the highest level of accuracy, and the service is fully compliant with regulation such as GDPR.

Vasco Pedro, CEO of Unbabel, commented: “For businesses aiming to become truly customer-centric, successfully enabling native communication is extremely important. Unbabel not only breaks down the language barrier between customer and business, but also helps those businesses remove language skills from their customer service hiring criteria to access top talent, making it an economical solution to providing multilingual service.”

Lauri Haav added: “The customer support side of things has been so intuitive that there’s really been no need for any kind of training – Unbabel works straight out of the box. Having the human element to Unbabel’s machine translation platform really lends a sense of security and trust to the whole operation. Our customers are demonstrably happier since we began working with Unbabel.”

About Unbabel:

Unbabel’s “Translation as a Service” platform allows modern enterprises to understand and be understood by their customers in dozens of languages. Powered by state-of-the-art AI and refined by a global crowd of thousands, Unbabel helps global brands like Booking.com, Facebook, Skyscanner, easyJet, Under Armour and Rovio remove language as a concern, increasing customer satisfaction and building a more efficient customer service operation in the process. Backed by Scale Venture Partners, Notion, Microsoft Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Samsung NEXT and Y Combinator, Unbabel is accelerating the shift to a world without language barriers.

For more information visit www.unbabel.com