Malaysia’s CIMB Bank has announced two major upgrades to its Enhanced Virtual Assistant (EVA), the bank’s dedicated mobile app, claiming the changes will deliver “a more personalised, convenient and improved experience” for its customers.

The updates include a new spending tracker and categoriser, named ‘Spend Analyser’, as well as improvements to the app’s existing natural language conversation capabilities.

CIMB said its new Spend Analyser – which automatically tags and categorises CIMB bank card transactions into separate expense categories (including ‘travel’, ‘entertainment’ or ‘dining’) – will help customers better manage their accounts and “make smarter financial decisions.”  

EVA’s chat capabilities have also undergone a significant overhaul, allowing it to handle “a wider range of chat-based transactions”, the bank said.

The new natural language processing capability will enable customers to chat with the app based on words in a natural conversation. This instinctive natural language messaging is EVA’s “key differentiator” which could represent the future of customers’ banking interactions, the bank said in a release.

Samir Gupta, CIMB chief executive, group consumer banking, said its upgrades would serve to improve customer convenience and experience across the bank’s digital platforms.

“These latest improvements to EVA are part of CIMB’s digital strategy to combine advanced fintech solutions with our strong in-house data analytics capabilities and customer base to deliver the best banking experience to our customers,” Gupta said.

EVA’s latest enhancements were delivered in collaboration with Singapore-based fintechs Moneythor (on intelligent recommendations and Spend Analyser) and Active.Ai (on deep learning-based natural language processing).

CIMB expects the collaborations to yield further CX enhancements in the future, including real-time data insights, which could “enable highly-relevant, on-site smart promotions”, as well as personalised and customised financial advice based on customer’s banking portfolio and spending patterns.

Launched in December 2016, CIMB’s EVA platform was the bank’s first ASEAN-based mobile application built specifically for the Malaysian market.