An AY Combinator-backed startup called Cambio is bringing AI to the banking industry in a surprising way. We are deploying AI bots on calls with businesses and consumers. The startup started by offering an AI-powered service that negotiated debt collections on behalf of consumers, which it says helped about 70% of its customers resolve collections and improve their credit scores. Now, Cambio is deploying its technology as an API to banks and credit unions to help with cold calling.
Cambio comes from Bresson Abraham (CEO), an entrepreneur with a background in banking. Previously, Abraham served as co-founder and CEO of SavvyIntel, a SaaS analytics solution for credit unions that was acquired by TruStage in 2017. After leaving the company, Abraham came up with the idea of using a banking app to help people struggling to improve their finances. This is something he understood personally, as he was in debt when he founded his last startup.
“I've managed to get better at it, but one in three adults in the United States has that problem,” he explains. “So we built Cambio on that premise.”
When founded in 2021, Cambio was envisioned as a neobank targeting this underserved market. But Abraham noticed that Cambio users were interested in tools to build better credit habits. After the startup was accepted into the Y Combinator accelerator in 2022, the team plans to rebuild the app and pivot to reflect a new focus on helping consumers get out of debt. Decided.
Over the past year, Cambio's service has grown to nearly 90,000 users and the app's business model has shifted from freemium to paid.
Image credits: Cambio
One of its new features was fueled by the popularity of ChatGPT. Customers were asking Cambio if it could help them resolve collection debts.
“One of the great things about ChatGPT is that you can actually coach people in real time as they talk to collectors,” Abraham says. “So we came up with an in-app solution where you make a call to a collector and our bot listens to the call and tells them what to return in real time.”
The founders said this was allowed because the calls were already being recorded by debt collectors and it was not a problem for the AI to “eavesdrop” on them.
That experience led customers to ask Cambio if it could handle calls on their behalf and just negotiate debt reductions. The company realized it could do that by first obtaining a signed power of attorney and then using his AI to call the collector.
“We had a very safe start, and people wanted to pay it back in full. [of debt] — who wanted that item removed from the collection report,” Abraham says.
Cambio has seen early success with this route, with 7 out of 10 customers improving their credit scores within 60 days of a call with the AI bot.
Cambio's AI bot tells the collector who it is calling on behalf of and emails the power of attorney documents when the collector requests proof. Because the call focused on a simple use case: paying off debt in full, it was relatively easy to keep the conversation within the negotiation guardrails.
That's not to say there weren't conflicts from the beginning. Abraham said Cambio initially had to deal with AI hallucinations, but it improved over time as the number of calls increased.
Once Cambio was able to manage debt collection calls, the company quickly came up with another idea. It's an AI called AviaryAI that banks and credit unions can use to call their customers. The technology leverages AI to improve sales calls and outreach calls that banks use to help cross-sell products to customers, such as alerting customers about new checking products, credit cards, debt protection services, and more. We support you.
Although the FCC recently declared AI-initiated robocalls illegal, Cambio believes its AI bot will be allowed. The company is also consulting with legal counsel regarding the nature of the bot and applicable laws.
“Banks, credit unions, and even our first customers are actually insurance companies. I chose three that are highly regulated industries,” Abraham points out. He said the company is actively introducing its technology to regulators, explaining how it's built, how the bots get there, and what the bots can and can't do. They say they are trying to cooperate with authorities.
“When we make these calls, we let people know they’re talking to a virtual assistant,” he says. “It’s not as simple as just putting audio on LLM and people hearing it.”
This call can start a conversation with the customer, but can also be transferred to a real person if needed. Cambio claims that AI-driven calls are just as successful as calls made by sales teams, with about 5-10% of calls being answered.
“If you compare this to humans, we can actually match that, if not better than that in certain use cases,” Abraham says.
Today's experience includes three different bots. One bot makes the call, another bot monitors the bot to make sure it doesn't need to be escalated, and a third bot monitors the entire call to see things like tone and what the customer says. This is a bot for analysis. On — Essentially provides a quality control perspective on the effectiveness of the call.
The technology is being trialled by a handful of early adopters, including Envisant, Encurage Financial Network, Agenium, and Skyla Credit Union.
The move into the B2B space won't eliminate the consumer-facing Cambio app, but the company will likely focus its monetization efforts on its API.
Cambio has raised $3 million in seed round funding from Builders, DVC, EGR Partners, Envisant, Encurage Financial Network, Goodwater Capital, Leonis Investissement, Sandhill Capital, YC, and other angel investors to support growth .
“We at DVC are committed to bringing much-needed technology to consumer financial products with the goal of increasing transparency and helping individuals better manage their debt and rebuild their credit scores. We are excited to support the Cambio team in their mission,” said Marina Davidova, DVC Managing Partner. “They not only have a clear vision, but they have also demonstrated the ability to relentlessly execute on it and build user-friendly solutions powered by sophisticated AI.”