Transforming the Customer Experience in Fintech with Zingly’s Gaurav Passi

Episode Overview

​Gaurav Passi is the founder and CEO of Zingly.ai, a pioneering company dedicated to transforming customer relationships through the integration of generative AI, human expertise, and data to achieve hyper-personalization at scale. With a vision to revolutionize customer experience, Gaurav has been instrumental in developing innovative solutions that seamlessly combine AI and human interaction, creating collaborative and customer-centric engagements. Under his leadership, Zingly.ai has introduced the concept of “Collaborative Customer Experience (CCX),” aiming to build meaningful relationships beyond transactions and reduce friction in customer interactions.

Before founding Zingly.ai in 2021, Gaurav held significant leadership roles in the cloud communications industry. He served as the President of the Cloud Business Group at Avaya Holdings Corp., where he was responsible for accelerating the company’s delivery of cloud-based solutions and expanding its market share in Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) globally. Prior to his tenure at Avaya, Gaurav was the Executive Vice President of Products and Technology at Five9, a leading provider of cloud contact center solutions. In this role, he spearheaded the development and growth of the company’s cloud offerings, significantly contributing to its success in the market.

Gaurav’s extensive experience also includes senior leadership positions at Deutsche Telekom Hosted Business Services, Amdocs Inc., and Ciena Corporation, where he oversaw product strategy, technology development, and business growth initiatives. His diverse background in technology and communications has equipped him with a deep understanding of the industry’s dynamics and the evolving needs of customers. Throughout his career, Gaurav has been recognized for his ability to formulate and execute strategies that drive innovation and digital transformation, positioning him as a thought leader in the field of customer experience and cloud communications

Episode Transcript

Gaurav Passi: Our technology will now sit in and make sure there’s a relationship building up and make sure that you’re moving the money as well. And you’re banking with us and not only banking with us. Now, I can give you more, you know, sell you loans and it brings everybody together. So the common saying in my mind is that the biggest issue that this industry faces is the customer base is very dormant.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Hey, welcome to Pay Pod, where we bring you conversations with the trailblazers shaping the future of payments and fintech. My name is Kevin Rosenquist. Thanks for being here today. I had the pleasure of speaking with Gaurav Passi, CEO of Zingly.ai, a company that’s rethinking the customer experience for the digital first era. In this episode, we dive deep into how AI and automation are transforming CX, especially in the high stakes world of financial services. From building trust in a digital first landscape to controlling your controlling your own narrative. Gaurav shares insights that every fintech leader should hear. So let’s get to it. Here’s Gaurav Parsi. All right, so anyone who listens to this show regularly knows how I often complain about the UX or customer experience in apps. It sort of amazes me how seemingly basic and obvious aspects are often overlooked or ignored in apps and online platforms, streaming platforms, video games, even. Whatever. It frustrates me. So did you found singly to to help shut people like me up?

Gaurav Passi: Well, that’s a great start. Yes, 100%. I think we call it,  some of some of the folks I’ve heard at the company was invented pretty much on four letters called 4OFORO.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Mhm. I actually I got a kick out of that when I saw that.

Gaurav Passi: You did actually my  when we came up with this idea, first I told my daughter,  I have this thing called furrow and she’s like, dad, it’s not four, it’s called FOMO. And I’m like, no, no, I know FOMO, but for the new thing it’s very painful and it’s called fear of reaching out. And I don’t understand, like, you know, in this age in form where we are using such advanced technologies and UX is so phenomenal. We’re paying subscription to companies. We want to bank, we want to do several things. And here we are, like finding it so hard to pick up a phone and call them. And after 30 minutes, you’re still trying to tell them. What is your favorite topping on your pizza? Like pepperoni. I told you like 29 minutes back. So I think it’s that world where,  the empathy through a great interface, great technology which is scalable, which is reachable,  which is always there in life is super important for all of us.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Mhm. What’s the biggest opportunity you see in rethinking CX for finance specifically for for finance.

Gaurav Passi: Yeah. I think  there are a few things in life for families and human beings which are very critical.  you know, finance, health, education for their families. When you’re dealing with money with someone, it’s a very, very important aspect of people’s lives. And,  it’s not just like a gaming aspect, which is entertainment. This one is like more serious in nature. And,  when you’re talking about some of these families and serious in nature subject, you want to be very empathetic and always be reachable and always give them a feeling that I’m there for you. So I feel like, you know, the,  growing up, I felt like there was so much,  of relationship banking used to happen. You could simply get into a branch, talk to someone. You felt like there was trust. You felt like, you know, somebody’s helping you out.  The last 20, 25 years, obviously, the scale has grown.  and we are getting away and away from relationship banking, for sure. And on the other side, you see, you know, the mega banks coming in,  taking over, you’re seeing regional banks starting to kind of, you know, just lose their ground.

Gaurav Passi: Round.  You have credit unions, which are also kind of, you know, trying to make sure that there’s an impact of their personalization that they always bring in. I think the world is becoming super noisy.  in my mind. And at the same time, I feel like we as consumers,  who are dealing with 1 to 5 banks, usually our patience is going all the way down. And by design, the way the system is working is we’re all kind of starting to gravitate towards mega banks. Like, that’s the only way for me to get trust. If you go there, then you are,  unfortunately, feeling very left out,  because it’s not very personalized. So long rambling,  relationship banking needs to make a comeback.  needs to make a comeback at infinite scale where everybody feels like it’s hyper personalized for them.  and that’s really the opportunity, I think, in banking that I would I can’t overemphasize.

 Kevin Rosenquist:  kind of in that same realm. From your perspective, what do you think is the biggest thing fintechs get wrong about the customer experience?

Gaurav Passi: I think.

 Kevin Rosenquist: You.

Gaurav Passi: Know, it’s a scale issue. At the end of the day, I don’t think fintechs have necessarily got anything wrong. It’s just how do you resolve the scale problem? People are not wanting to dial 800 numbers anymore. So if you’re still going on companies websites, you’re looking at contact us and you see a bunch of 800 numbers immediately that photo kicks in because like, I don’t I don’t have 30 minutes of my time right now to give you a call.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, it’s a long process.

Gaurav Passi: Like you said, it’s a very long process. It’s tedious. You know, people’s patience is down. People don’t have 15 seconds of patience to watch a TikTok. You know, they’ll scroll quickly up. And what did I.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Just say to you before this? I try to keep these about 30 minutes because it’s all about what people listen or listen to. Yeah.

Gaurav Passi: So yeah. So I think that is the real opportunity here,  to go, you know, provide people a simple, easy to use interfaces, whether it’s during hours, after hours,  whatever the hours are, you’re always reachable. You’re always there. You can start on your own. You got seconds to do something. You’re able to complete it.  it’s almost like, how can you make banking as easy as chatting with your friend? Uh. And you, can you get to that level?  can you make it scalable like that?  and I think that’s what the definition of relationship banking in my mind is.

 Kevin Rosenquist: You mentioned for fear of reaching out. I thought I really liked that on your site. I thought that it’s because we all have it. I mean, in business, in our personal lives, it’s like we don’t. My wife and I sometimes would be like, no, you call and order. No. You call. No. You, you know, like nobody wants to do it anymore. You know, you know. Can you talk a little bit more about fear of reaching out and the way you see it and how you’re addressing that?

Gaurav Passi: I never look at simple scenarios. You know, we are talking to banks, which are simply struggling with simple problems like, hey, I have routine inquiries coming in to my call center. Routine inquiries are I want to change my password. What were my last five transactions that I had? Um. Hey, I want to wire some money. And can you tell me about your routing number is? Can I get some more checks?  I need a checkbook that I don’t have, but you can go on and on. Like, this is like, one of the top call reasons that companies face.

 Kevin Rosenquist: People still call for those.

Gaurav Passi: People still.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Call.

Gaurav Passi: For those. Wow. Okay. And, you know, they’re all kind of demographics going on, right? I want to wire the money. How do I do this thing? I am very interested in your auto loan. I want to know more about it. Think about things like collections going on. Like there’s so many scenarios that are going on where you almost have to take your time in the day to pick up the phone and call them. If you go to their websites, the challenge and the website and apps is again lets you those 800 numbers. Or sometimes there’ll be a silly little, you know, live chat sitting on the bottom and it’s pre-trained and like, ah, this is nothing but a what a you know, that IVR that we all deal with. Press one for this, press two for that. It’s almost like a visual IVR.

 Kevin Rosenquist: That’s very.

Gaurav Passi: True. Yeah. That’s the forum. So if I only have a few seconds and I just wanted to kind of quickly come in and say, hey, what’s your routing number. And it gives me the answer, I’m out, I’m done. It’s all I needed. It’s almost like, you know, texting a friend saying, hey, eight for golf this Saturday. Yeah, 8 a.m. done. So that is the idea. But the problem is always deeper than that. There are a lot of complex scenarios as well. You know, there’s a lot of,  complexity around which we can talk a little bit more. These are like the simple, easy to take, you know, routine inquiries out. And now the chatbots are what Zynga has done is a very empathetic and very precision. Rates are like 100%. There’s no hallucination because the way we have designed the chatbot is based on a very enhanced technology. It takes banks and companies and fintechs their own data itself. So it’s not going to the public lens and trying to make answers up. We have done a very, very large banks, which has been proven now at this point in time. And that I think is where the future is.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, it’s interesting because you mentioned, you know, people needing, you know, bringing back relationship banking, but you’re bringing back relationship banking through technology instead of the in person experience. Do you find that especially with younger generations, that that is enough for them to get that relationship?

Gaurav Passi: Well, a great point. So first of all, I think with technology, the generative AI that we have, we call it Bob and buddy is the one which is always there for you. And it takes, you know, 60 to 70% of these routine inquiries like we were talking about earlier from a call center totally away. You don’t need to do it, but we do it in such a way, Kevin, that everything is persistent in nature, meaning it never evaporates, never disappears. If you pick up the phone and call after the call, you know nobody knows what happened, right? Or you are doing those live chats. It’s gone. But Zheng Li is always persistent. Whether you are changing your browsers, whether you are changing your devices, even like a simple question you ask, it’s always there for you. It’s a space between you and the bank, so it’s always between a permanent space that has been created. Number two, to your point, which is very, very important point I think is outside of the routine inquiries, it is equally important to understand when to bring the human in the loop. And we have a technology which I feel is like the magic technology of Zheng Li is called relationship AI, which literally is always understanding when to bring a human in the loop. Are you now at a point where you know this is a high friction product or a high friction service, or you are a very high value customer or a particular day in the life that you’re going through, because your previous journey and sentiments have been in a very different place.

Gaurav Passi: So the technology understands the entire journey. Technology understands your products and services and very quickly determines when to bring a human in the loop. If you think about sales scenarios, if I’m trying to get an auto loan, we’re wasting a lot of time in people’s lives by having them talk to someone. I’m not there yet. I just want to kind of ask you some questions. So our technology would auto qualify you in that case and understand that. Hey, now I’ve auto qualified you now a sales person can come in and really help you, you know, get through the process. So or you are asking for a particular question, but you are a high value customer. You know, that’s the kind of customer I should be throwing a red carpet on and not not getting you lost on AI only, right? So that is a very important aspect of it. And the third big Aspect, which we call single rooms. It’s a very patented technology that we. Created back in the days. Vendors came up with this terminology called. Omnichannel, which literally was a marketing fad, if nothing else.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Oh yeah.

Gaurav Passi: Buzzword for sure. It’s a buzzword, right? So but I think there was some, some something in there that was really needed, which was about can I come in from any channel I want? Can you make sure that I go between channels and the context stays right there, right. For both parties, both for the banker and for the bank. So I think that’s where our technology of rooms does now is giving you a very permanent place where you can, you know, go voice, video chat, text. You can communicate in any ways you want. You can upload your documents. Hey, if you ask me for my pay stub or I’m doing venture banking with you and you want to know my company articles, whatever, boom! I’m posting with you.  Every single thing stays there. It’s permanent in nature. I can do media with you. I can do pictures, videos, files, whatever. So what it does is when every single thing is in one place, we can now understand how AI becomes critical immediately because it has so much clear real time data to understand. And on the other side, we very deeply integrate with your, you know, the phone systems like cars, we know contact center systems or with CRM companies like Salesforce. So we have the historical information and we have the real time information going on. You assemble them together. We also do integration with your core banking system. We do integration with your, you know, other technologies and systems and websites and knowledge bases. So it’s very flush with information that is tied to a bank. That’s how we are able to take the 6,070% away, and the 30% to 40% that are more complex in nature. It makes a person’s life very easy and fun and removes the actual destroys that photo part.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, you mentioned omnichannel. It’s a buzzword and I buy it But I think it does. It does. It’s easy to understand. That’s nice.  Do you feel like a lot of financial companies or just companies in general struggle? To deliver an omnichannel product or approach to customer service?

Gaurav Passi: Oh, 100%, I think it never existed. You know what happened before Gen I, I think there was a massive wave on what we called. Digital transformation. Right. And a lot of people get lost thinking like in digital transformation. Digital channels came through. But that’s not really true. Right? What happened was the companies. Had to get ready with digital transformation with more digital properties like websites and apps and pages. And and and more online banking and stuff like that. So I think once that was figured out. Now is that phase of like, okay, I have those investment in digital properties. I’ll give you an example. This is like the biggest thing I keep talking about is like one of our customers, they get. 1.9 to 2 million calls in their call center every year, but they get 2.5 million visitors on their website every month. That’s ten x the traffic. Yeah, that is really a testament of all the work that has gone into digital properties is now customers are visitors are moving to your digital properties. Isn’t that what you wanted?

 Kevin Rosenquist: Right.

Gaurav Passi: But the challenge now is you’re not engaging with them on those digital properties. You’re still engaging with them on the phone. So that, I think, is the big disconnect. So now if you want to engage with them on digital properties, you cannot engage with them on voice only. That’s not a possibility. You cannot engage with them on pre-trained chatbots. That’s not a possibility because you invested them to be more to come in the future. So be modern in future. Now you give them whichever way they want to talk. Make the conversation persistent. Make the conversation permanent. Give them a space as long as they should feel like this is my fintech. This is my bank. I love coming here. I’ll give you an example. Like talk a lot of fintechs where they are opening these accounts very quickly because it’s very easy to open up an account. But people are actually not even moving the money into it. So what they struggle at the board level now is now that opening an account, is that really a customer? Is there an opportunity? Because I made it easy for you to open up an account. I don’t have to take you through the rigor of KYC and made it easy for you. So okay, but you haven’t moved any money. So our technology will now sit and make sure there’s a relationship building up and make sure that you’re moving the money as well. And you’re banking with us. And not only banking with us. Now, I can give you more, you know, sell you loans and it brings everybody together. So the common saying in my mind is that the biggest issue that this industry faces is the customer base is very dormant.

Gaurav Passi: We’re all guilty as charged. We will go look at our account balance and pretty much leave. My problem is with the institutions of like if you have worked hard on those digital properties, you have then made it easy for them to look at their accounts. Why not engage with them? If I’m coming to my account, I’m looking at $10,000 in my checking account, and I’m getting, I don’t know, 0.1% of interest rate. I’m just making this up. But money market is going to give me like 5%. Why are you not nudging me and saying, hey, move your money into the money market account and I can help you? And then I’m engaging with you, right? Because you’re helping me grow money. You’re helping me do something, or I see you engaging me to give me a HELOC. You know, things like that which I need. So that’s personalization to me, that hyper personalization is what omnichannel is about. In my mind, that hyper personalization. If you have to take that and put it at a scale, at an infinite scale, omnichannel cannot do it. That’s where I because I will give you the scale. So hyper personalization comes through. I feel like omnichannel and scale comes through AI. So that’s the two that we are bringing together. That’s why we call it infinite scale with hyper personalization. Because we can do because we invested in it both Bolt and the results have been phenomenal, which we can talk.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah. Because you’re not, you don’t feel salesy at that moment. You know, like I think a lot of times when we all get emails all the time, but it’s it’s not like it’s just sales emails, you know, like I get emails from my different banks and it’s like,  you know, open a credit card and get this rate, get this, get that, get that. It’s like, well, I don’t need another credit card. But yeah, if you’re, you’re talking to somebody about, well, you’re not getting the return on your, on your money because you’ve got it in this account versus this account. Well then all of a sudden that’s a great example because then all of a sudden people are listening.

Gaurav Passi: Right. And it’s not salesy because, you know, when it’s salesy, when you’re not even looking for something and somebody’s starting to.

 Kevin Rosenquist:  you’re saying an email sent to you. Yeah.

Gaurav Passi: Right. What’s not salesy is when things are happening in the moment of truth, when you’re actually checking your account balance, when you’re there’s a need and the need is personalized to you. And now somebody is nudging you right on your account balance page or on your mobile app and saying, hey, interested in going to do this? And like, actually, I was thinking about it, right?

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah.

Gaurav Passi: Yeah. That’s the moment of truth in my mind, which is really what’s becoming the world real time, which is where CRM companies are struggling. CRM companies are very historical in nature. All the data is very historical.  you know, contact center companies are very willing to give a phone call where people don’t want to give a phone call. And we are filling that gap of like making every single thing real time moment of truth.

 Kevin Rosenquist:  and you mentioned trust too, and I think, I think that that is difficult a lot of times with digital first a digital first world, like how what do you think fintechs need to do to to continue to work on that trust and to to maybe even build it with they don’t even have it. Like sometimes I feel like they don’t even have trust in some of these companies. They’re just sort of they’re like, what can fintechs do to, to grow that trust?

Gaurav Passi: I think two words do not mean yes. When you give somebody this feeling that I know you, you’re banking with me is the biggest form of trust in my mind. If every single thing has to be started from scratch and I have to explain myself, I’m like, have I not been banking with you for some point of time? And you have a good point. Most important thing, my money that my family runs on, and I have to explain every single thing to you like, and the data gets evaporated. And you remember last time we talked like, oh, I don’t see that. Like, no, I called you two days back.  it was like, I don’t see that. Those are the small little details that is very easy to bypass or not pay attention to. But I think Nomi is, I think, the most important thing, which is why I keep talking about personalization and how do you make it hyper personalized nowadays? Personalization was good before. Hyper is what’s important where you’re now recommending me things you are. You’re nudging me to do stuff which is relevant to me. And I think that is what creates trust and leads to a relationship.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, that’s what I know me. I like that a lot. Because that goes back to your original point. I think we talked about right off the bat about, you know, the old school way of banking where you went into a branch and people knew you and they said, hey, how’s it going? Gaurav, like, good to see you again. Like, you know, like, I mean, that that kind of stuff doesn’t happen anymore for most of us. And. Yeah. So that’s a really good point. Look at the landscape. Are there industries outside of finance that you think fintech could look at for inspiration and maybe learn some lessons?

Gaurav Passi: Oh, absolutely. I mean, look at we all use Amazon. Guilty as charged again.  you can see how Amazon interacts with their customers.  Nobody can miss the recent news on Klarna.  and they just filed an IPO and all that stuff. Klarna went and built their CX and spent a lot of, you know, wherever the all money whatever on to do that thing. And there’s news that it took 60 to 70% of that and automated that. Right. And as a result, the IPO has interesting numbers when it comes down to margins. Right. So I think there’s a lot of learning from that end as well, which is like, hey, how can and most companies, most banks, most fintechs don’t have that kind of wherewithal like what Amazon would have or Klarna would have. So I think those are inspirations to draw from. This is becoming a real technology. We have a very large, you know, fortune 500 customer, as an example, who did get inspired, who did see these things. And rather than getting fearful of AI, they use the inspiration by these kind of companies and like, hey, I want that kind of experience for my customers. I want to make sure that they trust me. I know it’s a very competitive market. I don’t want to be at a place where my competitors are coming in with these kind of solutions first, while I’m sitting and watching on the sidelines, and then I’m trying to catch up. So I think this is a world of leadership. This is a world of high competition, and the only way to win in this world is like, you know, bringing that kind of trust to your customers, getting inspired by other industries, learning what’s happening in quickly, adopting, not just sitting on the sidelines and observing for too much.

 Kevin Rosenquist: It can be overwhelming to kind of like try to improve your CX. I mean, obviously, especially the bigger the company, it can be like there could be a lot of processes that have to be changed. Where do you recommend people begin if they do finally realize, okay, I need to improve this. I need to make this better. Where do you recommend they start?

Gaurav Passi: I think every brand, every company, every fintech that we have chatted with, everybody wants to modernize their see because we are in a business and we can’t be in business without customers and is the fundamental of what we are doing. I think the easiest, simplest way to start is look where your traffic is going and start to understand if your traffic is starting to get towards your digital properties, which most companies is true.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Should be anyway. Yeah.

Gaurav Passi: And engage with your traffic right there.  You know, make it proactive for them.  give them small little use cases. Sometimes people come to us for simple use cases like, hey, I, I’m tired of my after hours support. I’m paying these outsourcing companies. And they’re really, you know, taking my brand and just destroying my brand. So very simple use case to start. If you’re putting a great way engagement with your customers after hours and technologies like this, we just talked about a great way to start. You know, there’s another way of wallet sharing. I want to increase my wallet share. I already have these customers. Why can’t I sell them more loans and why can’t I, you know, move them from checking accounts to if it’s a corporate or commercial, why can’t I sell them, you know, corporate cards or venture banking or whatever, or personal cards? A great way to do that. So just coming up with small use cases. Start small, but understand what your vision is and you can go achieve that. Don’t you think like you have to boil the ocean, is what I’m saying.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Do you think that we’ll see a day in the near future where customer service is fully automated?

Gaurav Passi: We will. But I think that’s a long way out. I mean, you’re sitting in 2024 and me saying that we are able to automate 60 to 70% of customer service already. I mean, it’s a big leap from where we were. Sure. I mean, gosh.

 Kevin Rosenquist: A short amount of time to change.

Gaurav Passi: That, because even in 2022, we could have not said that, right? I would have been like, yeah, that’s so future. But it’s like it’s happening today. So now the question is, can you take those to your question? Can we take those 30 to 40% very complex scenarios like, hey, I want to open up a new account and transfer money or 401 K consolidations. And you know, there are a lot of complex, complex issues as well.  I think over a period of a few years, you would start noticing that more and more will start to get automated.  however,  whenever people are looking at JNI, I think the first thinking that comes to mind is can I reduce my cost? Sure. And that’s not that. That’s a given in my mind at this point of time. Right. It’s more exciting to understand, can I scale in such a way, going back to relationship banking, if I’m reducing my cost, then you’re using JNI. If your only singular focus is to reduce cost, I’d say then what returns you will get with JNI and technologies like this will not be very positive. However, if you have growth in mind, if you have relationship banking in mind growth not only in your revenues with customer growth in mind, which is where the revenue is going to come from, I think that’s more exciting.

Gaurav Passi:  so the more board members and CXOs and CEOs that we’re talking to, really, that is where their head is going. Like, hey, how can I increase my revenue through this thing? And if I’m increasing my revenue, it’s very clear that I’m increasing my customer growth. They’re sticking with me longer, not only just new customer acquisition, how much new wallet share I can get from existing customers. That means my customer starts growing. So one of the simple things we do in our platform, Kevin, is we always provide both the customer and the brand an understanding of what the customer starts with. A very simple thing, much like an Uber rating. So both of them are seeing a number with an emoji next to it, like, hey, that’s how my entire journey has been. It’s confusion to you and to me. And there’s so much data that goes behind that sentiment analysis. I think that kind of stuff is more exciting. No revenue acceleration, more wallet share, more customers coming to you, becoming competitive. Yes, I am reducing costs along the way as well.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Sure.

Gaurav Passi: Yeah. But that’s what the purpose is.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, that’s a good point too. Like, yeah, that’s going to happen. The cost savings is going to happen. Think about it in a different way. What else are you trying to achieve here and how can we get there.

Gaurav Passi: Yeah I think the biggest fear that I, I’m seeing from other CXOs is they’re fearful, like, hey, consumers are already going to ChatGPT world and asking questions about us, right? Yeah, we all do. Right? Yeah. There we are, already moving away from all the hard work and investment of digital properties like websites and apps that these banks and fintechs have done. Right. So people are now in ChatGPT. The problem is, when you’re on ChatGPT and let’s say you’re asking about ABC Fintech company, you are by design going to start asking what the competitors do. So now they’re losing the narrative completely. So the issue is it’s all public LLM, public information. You’re not able to set your tone and your narrative. So that is the biggest thing that I hear. Biggest caution to everybody as well. Bring the narrative back to you. Don’t lose that narrative and not only losing your future prospects, future customers, your visitors going down on your websites and all that stuff. But you’re also losing your customers. They could be going to those they are already going to, those kind of, you know, third party systems and asking about you and giving them more information. And like, I have the data, I have data that is behind my Pin, behind my authentication that you’re not even giving it. So the story that, you know, the other systems are giving third party systems is half baked because they don’t have access to the private data. In our case, we have access to that private data. We keep the narrative about you, the fintech, the bank, and that makes you competitive, that makes you that, that that brings the power, I think.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah. And if you can keep the narrative about the customer too, right. If you can keep the customer feeling like they’re as great as ChatGPT is, it doesn’t it doesn’t know me. You know what I mean? I mean, it knows what I tell it about me, but it doesn’t have the same information that something like what you’re talking about would have. So yeah, it’s a really good account.

Gaurav Passi: It doesn’t know your account balances. It doesn’t know how you shop. It doesn’t know where are you spending your money? It doesn’t have all the information. So what answer is giving you and it gives you so confidently you’re like, oh, let me just go do it. But that was half baked answer. Yeah, absolutely. You know, you don’t know the narrative of the bank. You don’t know the narrative of the customer. And you’re giving a very confident way and you’re throwing in another competition. It’s risky in my mind. So I think this is kind of where we are taking our customers, and we’re seeing tremendous amount of success because of that.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, I get that too, because one of the things I’ve done on ChatGPT is I create my own GPT. So like if I have, you know, if I want to ask fintech questions, I have a fintech GPT. If I want to ask cooking, I have my own cooking. I created a cooking GPT for myself. You know what I mean? So it stands to reason that that that we’re going to we already probably want more of a personalized approach, and we’re just going to keep wanting more of a personalized approach when it comes to our generative AI.

Gaurav Passi: Absolutely. Hey, we should do a cooking podcast one of these days.

 Kevin Rosenquist: I’m in, I’m in, I’m down. You like to cook, too? Yeah, I.

Gaurav Passi: I like to cook. And I have another friend who’s like, he’s in big time in fintech.  I think he should be the third one over here.  If he comes in,  he’s going to talk a lot about cooking. His name is Mark. He’s just phenomenal in cooking and all that.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Awesome, I love it. Let’s do it. Yeah. So final question is, you know, as the customer expectations continue to climb and all that. Where do you think this goes? Where do you think the CX goes in the near term in the next 2 to 5 years?

Gaurav Passi: Maybe we at Zynga are already kind of taking in such a place where, as I said, we’re bringing narrative back to companies and whatnot, which we just talked about. We are feeling like consumer is going to get more and more in control, which is really what we are trying to do. And as consumer, Ah.  We will have companies like Zynga will provide a system which is there’s a AI agent for you to be going and talking to any bank or any other healthcare companies or whatever companies like. I am your system to go talk for you. I am your agent from here on. So I think that’s the kind of automation that we are seeing in the future.  that’s the vision that companies like us have that is not going to be too far out.  That’s something that, you know, companies like Zingly.ai are already working on.  That has been our vision from the get go on. How do you make a consumer’s life easy to deal with the brands, even if you think about, you know, CRM, customer relationship management, where C is the first word, which means customer. The reality is they don’t have customer facing applications. So where is the customer first in any of this though? Being a customer first in my mind means that you are now having brands around me as opposed to brand who puts customer in the center. It’s the opposite way now. Customers are in the center and brands are around me now. I am able to go to any brand through these agents that I’m talking about, AI agents, and I’m able to buy shop service on board. Hey, go. Can you go on board for me with fintech ABC?  Hey, can you transfer my money from this account to that account for this thing? That’s what I’m. That’s where we are going.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Wow. Yeah, it’s moving fast. It’s fun to watch.

Gaurav Passi: We’re very fast.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah. Yeah. All right. Gaurav, so great to have you on the podcast. Thanks so much for being here.

Gaurav Passi: Kevin. You bet. Thank you so much. It was wonderful talking to you