“We use Gemini as a translator, as an interface between input from customers and multimodal agents and the language chains we have built,” says Piotrowski. “It helps us service the last mile of the customer-facing experience. It’s customized to only work with data, so we avoid illusions. Explainability is important to our clients, so there’s no doubt in the conversation.”
As Bud Financial continues to grow and develop new applications, Piotrowski is optimistic about the potential for growth in financial products powered by GenAI. “Financial institutions don’t need a better CRM,” he explains. “Getting quality data is key. Banks need to make better use of the data they already have to understand their customers. We think this is a very untapped area. There is a lot we can do in terms of rethinking how banks operate and making them more data-focused.”
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BankUnited revolutionizes customer service with SAVI
In addition to applying GenAI tools to customer data to gain insights, the technology is playing an increasing role in helping financial institutions provide better customer service.
BankUnited, a local bank headquartered in Miami Lakes, Florida, uses GenAI to power its internal chatbot, SAVI. Before SAVI, BankUnited employees sometimes struggled to provide time-sensitive answers to inquiries from the bank’s small business customers, resulting in long call times and inconsistent answers.
BankUnited worked with AWS to develop SAVI using Bedrock services and the Claude 2 model. SAVI acts as a policy management system and provides access to over 400 internal documents that employees can query using natural language.
“This was a game changer,” said Jeiner Morales, senior vice president of data analytics and business systems at BankUnited. “We’ve gone from being reactive, spending time researching things and waiting for answers, to being proactive. Bankers can now get fast, accurate answers right in front of them. This allows them to spend less time searching for information and more time actually listening to customers, understanding their needs, and helping them make decisions.”
When an employee asks a question, SAVI returns an answer within 10 seconds with 95% accuracy. BankUnited also benefits broadly from GenAI tools.
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“Back-office support calls have decreased by about 40%,” Morales said. “Customer satisfaction, employee confidence, and even training outcomes have improved. New employees feel more supported because they have this tool to guide them. ROI isn’t just money; it means time saved, better decisions, and employee and customer satisfaction. And by that measure, this was a real win.”
After overcoming the initial challenges of working with GenAI, BankUnited is now in a position to continue innovating across its 55 locations.
“This was one of our first generative AI implementations, so risk management and governance were new competencies we needed to build on,” Morales says. “The technology is new and we needed to be 100% confident that we were protecting customer and enterprise data. We worked very closely with our risk and compliance teams to put guardrails in place, from data access to model validation to human review. This allowed us to create a framework that we use today and continue to mature for our AI initiatives.”
