Banco Solidario blends AI and human care to improve service across digital channels

A bank focused on expanding financial inclusion

Banco Solidario has played a key role in strengthening financial inclusion and economic development in Ecuador. In 2025 alone, Banco Solidario served more than 114,500 small entrepreneurs and disbursed approximately $208 million. This significantly contributed to strengthening its financial inclusion index, which reached nearly 23%. 

As demand for accessible financial services grew, the bank needed to ensure its customer experience could scale alongside its mission to deliver fast, reliable and close support to underserved communities across both digital and traditional channels. 

Core to its success are the bank’s innovative risk assessment and management practices and its customer experience, orchestrated centrally through its contact center. Indeed, the contact center supports its massive credit placement model, which includes sales and collections channels. 

Until 2019, the financial institution’s contact center operated on an on-premises, internally developed solution. But the legacy technology made it increasingly difficult to keep pace with complex and changing customer needs. 

“When we saw the need to add more channels, we started the search for a versatile platform with the capacity to manage the omnichannel ecosystem,” said Damián Cruz, Deputy Manager of Business – Digital Channels at Banco Solidario. 

Digital transformation paves the way for AI innovation

To better serve its customers, Banco Solidario transformed its digital banking operations with the Genesys Cloud™ platform.  This move made it the first bank in Ecuador to have a cloud contact center solution and established the foundation for AI-driven automation at scale. 

Six years later, Banco Solidario is seeing value beyond its initial expectations. The bank has centralized all service channels within the Genesys Cloud platform, allowing it to seamlessly manage voice, click-to-call, video, email, IVR and chatbot interactions.  

“The platform has allowed us to centralize the management of multiple service channels within a single environment,” said Cruz. “The integration allows us to optimize interaction routing to agents, improve operational visibility through monitoring and reporting tools, and maintain high service levels — despite fluctuations in demand.”   

As part of its transformation, Banco Solidario used historical call center recordings to optimize its knowledge base. This data-driven foundation allowed the bank to expand automation with confidence, ensuring virtual assistants could deliver consistent, high-quality responses.  

Building on this foundation, the bank deployed a virtual assistant and integrated it with WhatsApp and social media channels through an integration partner. This enables the bank to automate high-volume interactions while delivering consistent support across digital channels. 

The bank has also launched a “virtual branch,” a service channel that allows customers to connect with an advisor through video calls. Meant to replicate the in-branch experience, the virtual branch supports interactions that require a higher level of advisory or stronger customer authentication.  

Adoption of the virtual branch has increased yearly and now represents 30% of total interactions across alternative channels at Banco Solidario over the past 15 months. Banco Solidario is also scaling AI-driven automation across interactions through expanded self-service with its IVR and the virtual assistant. Today, fewer than 13% of interactions are escalated to a human agent, demonstrating the effectiveness of its AI-first engagement model.  

This shift frees agents to focus on more strategic and higher-value activities. It allows them to become trusted financial advisors who can not only provide resolutions but also identify opportunities to better serve customers and offer them the financial products and services that best suit their needs.   

Orchestrating smarter, more human experiences in banking

The bank’s CX transformation has provided other benefits, as well. Currently, more than 80% of voice calls are answered within 10 seconds. And call abandonment rates remain below 2%, which is significantly lower than industry benchmarks.  

From an operational perspective, service levels exceed 96% and continue to improve, highlighting the platform’s ability to efficiently scale.  

These improvements enable Banco Solidario to support continued growth in customer demand through AI-driven scale without a proportional increase in operational costs helping the bank expand access to financial services while maintaining efficiency. 

By combining AI-driven automation with human expertise, Banco Solidario is building a more scalable and sustainable model for financial inclusion, one that allows the bank to serve more customers, more quickly, with the same closeness and with greater consistency. 

Building on the success it’s seen so far, Banco Solidario continues to expand its use of Genesys Cloud to further enhance automation and deliver more personalized customer experiences. 

Looking ahead, the bank will diversify its contact channels and invest in advanced capabilities, such as AI-powered IVR, speech and text analytics, WhatsApp calling, voicebots, and Genesys Cloud Agent Copilot. 

Cruz sees Genesys Cloud Agent Copilot as an opportunity to further evolve the bank’s customer and agent experience. In its initial deployment phase, Cruz expects this will improve service quality and reduce handling times by equipping agents with more accurate and contextualized responses in real time.  

“We see great potential in integrating Copilot with our chatbot, particularly in natural language understanding and generating more fluid conversations,” added Cruz. This will allow the bank to evolve from structured flows to more natural interactions, reducing the need for menus or predefined options. 

Over time, Banco Solidario aims to further unify AI-driven and human-assisted experiences, creating more intuitive, conversational interactions that adapt to customer needs in real time. 

In Phase 2, Banco Solidario plans to leverage Agent Copilot to optimize interaction categorization, allowing the bank to automatically classify why a customer is reaching out. The solution is also expected to help improve data quality.   

“What excites us most about this solution is its ability to enhance both operational efficiency and customer experience, combining intelligent automation with more personalized and contextual interactions,” said Cruz.  

To learn more about the solutions featured in this case study, visit www.genesys.com.