When it came time for Esquire Bank to identify a business line to trial different artificial intelligence tools, the man in charge of the marketing department raised his hand.
Kyall Mai is the chief innovation officer at Esquire Bank, the $1.9 billion digital bank unit of Jericho, New York-based Esquire Financial Holdings, which focuses on a niche customer base of plaintiffs’ attorneys. He joins Reinventing Banking to share why the marketing team was the perfect test case for the bank and how the year-long AI experiment has gone.
Mai says Esquire’s AI governance committee opted to authorize the marketing department to use AI, given the absence of more specific guidance from bank regulators. Esquire wanted to use AI to generate revenue, rather than just reduce expenses. It looked for business lines and departments that rely on a lot of human-generated text and images as good use cases.
“What’s beautiful about the marketing team is [that] there is always a human in the loop. A marketing person is checking the words before [they go] out to a customer,” says Mai, who oversees the marketing team. “That felt very safe and sound as a testing bed for the bank to learn and dip their feet into AI.”
Esquire’s marketing group uses both generative AI, which can generate content based on user prompts, and predictive AI to reach current and prospective clients with segmented, personalized messaging. One way they use generative AI is by feeding it a larger piece of high-value content — like a customer testimonial, webinar or case study produced by the marketing team. The generative AI tool can summarize or break it into smaller pieces of content that would work for different readers and sites. That testimonial becomes a LinkedIn post, a video description or an email ready to be sent to different segmented customer bases with a variety of subject lines. The marketing team also uses predictive AI to suggest items on its Lawyer IQ site, a Netflix-style content site the bank uses to generate helpful content for lawyers.
Mai, a Vietnamese war refugee who has worked across the globe, including in Australia and Europe, says both older and younger employees have come to see these AI tools as useful to their jobs. He adds that the time the team saved has created greater opportunities to collaborate with the sales team and that 50% of the bank’s inbound leads now come from digital marketing.
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