Bank takes robo-advice to the next level

Meet Josie, ASB’s new digital assistant. She’s a New Zealand banking first, and will make an appearance in about a month’s time to guide future business owners through the process of starting a business.

Josie is an ethnic composite ‘‘New Zealander’’. She’s been carefully designed to mirror a little of everyone: part Maori, a little bit Pacific Island, a little bit Asian, and some Pakeha.

Her home will be the bank branch, on a screen where business banking customers can walk up to her and start talking.

She responds to questions in less than 100 milliseconds, making the interaction feel very natural, ASB said.

In technical jargon, Josie is a ‘‘personalised, human-like interface powered by artificial intelligence’’, and uses ‘‘audio analytics and computer vision capabilities to be aware of her surroundings‘‘.

She’ll even see from customers’ faces whether what she’s saying is boring them, says Danny Tomsett from FaceMe, which developed Josie for ASB.

It was FaceMe’s second deployment of an artificial intelligence (AI) persona in New Zealand, following the deployment of ‘‘Vai’’ as a digital biosecurity officer for the Ministry for Primary Industries at Auckland International Airport to answer questions from passengers.

ASB’s executive general manager of retail banking, Russell Jones, said Josie’s job would be to help customers launch small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

‘‘Our SME customers have been asking for easy access to relevant information so we’re engaging with New Zealand’s large SME population to understand the range of questions they have when setting up and managing a business,’’ he said.

Tomsett said AI machines would do an increasing amount banking work, but that did not necessarily mean a reduction in human staff numbers.

Instead, organisations could do more, leaving their human workers to focus on providing a good customer experience.

Josie was named after the firstever full-time ASB employee, a man named Joseph Coombes.

In time, Tomsett predicted that organisations would have whole teams of AI assistants tailored to the age, gender, ethnicity and language of individual customers.

Farro buys Grocer’s Market

Boutique grocery chain Farro Fresh is buying The Grocer’s Market in Auckland’s Mount Eden from its receiver. TGM Trading, The Grocer’s Market’s trading company, was placed in liquidation in February after its director, Aaron Drever, failed to make contractual payments to the Nosh Group receiver. TGM liquidator Damien Grant of Waterstone Insolvency said TGM owed $250,000 to 30 suppliers. Farro chief executive Bryce Howard said Drever contacted him to buy the store in February before it was put in receivership and TGM in liquidation, and discussions had been ongoing since then. The store would reopen in two months.

Accountant pleads guilty

An accountant who ran his practice despite being bankrupt has pleaded guilty to seven charges under the Insolvency Act. Stuart Francis Clarke ran an accounting practice in the Auckland suburb of Ponsonby under various names after he was declared bankrupt despite warnings from the official assignee (OA). The sentence for concealing property from the OA is up to three years in jail, and the charge for managing a business while bankrupt without consent from the OA carries up to two years’ prison. Clarke will be sentenced in the Auckland District Court next month.

TVNZ welcomes ad boost

Television New Zealand will focus more on local programming after arresting a decline in its television advertising income. The state-owned broadcaster increased its profit for the six months ended December 31 by a third, to $17 million, thanks largely to $2.8m in cost savings that flowed through from earlier cuts. Chief executive Kevin Kenrick said advertising revenues from both its broadcast and its online Ondemand service increased to total $162m, an overall rise of 1.7 per cent. TVNZ would tilt its spending more towards local content over time, he said.

Spotify to drum up $1.4b

Music-streaming pioneer Spotify is hoping to attract a new crowd of fans on Wall Street to help fend off the competitive threat posed by Apple. Spotify will expand its financial arsenal with an initial public offering aiming to raise US$1 billion (NZ$1.4b). That figure could change as Spotify’s bankers assess investor demand. The company’s first steps toward its IPO came in a confidential filing a few weeks ago, but the documents were not released until yesterday. They revealed Luxembourg-based Spotify’s service boasts 71 million subscribers, nearly twice as many as Apple’s rival service. Spotify lost €1.2b last year.