Banks’ growing reliance on chatbots to handle customer service tasks worries consumer watchdog

By KEN SWEET
AP Business Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — Can you trust Erica, or Sandi or Amy to increasingly control parts of your financial life without giving you inaccurate information or sending money to the wrong place? That’s what the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is asking in a report released Tuesday, where the bureau lays out a number of concerns about the growing use of chatbots by banks to handle routine customer service requests. Among the agencies’ concerns is that banks may cut back on human customer service employees and that chatbots, if poorly designed, may run afoul of federal laws that govern how debts are collected or how personal information is being used.