As the coronavirus sent shockwaves across global markets, clients turned to J.P. Morgan via a traditional yet enduring channel: email. Heightened volatility meant the corresponding email volume surged by 50% for some client servicing teams.
While email enables critical interactions between the firm and its clients, enormous volumes make it challenging for client service teams to prioritize and process incoming inquiries. Enter 'EVA', Email Virtualization Automaton. EVA is already having a significant impact in the Corporate and Investment Bank (CIB), as it helps to automatically route and now, crucially, resolve email inquiries at scale.
Many teams across the bank have already successfully adopted EVA. One example of this success has been EVA's partnership with the CIB's Collateral & CPG (CCPG) operations team. The CCPG Ops team supports the firm’s Collateral and Credit portfolio group, who plays a large role in mitigating the firm’s credit risk exposure. In this example, the integration of EVA automated the resolution of J.P. Morgan-initiated margin calls across CCPG Ops’ team mailboxes. EVA supports the team at each step of a margin call booking, involving extraction from unstructured emails to construct affirmation of margin call agreements (up to 75% straight-through-processing) and handling booking and movement utilizing the Acadia third party platform. In March and April, this capability helped CCPG Ops seamlessly handle a 50% increase in volumes, providing scalability during turbulent market conditions by processing 12k calls and saving over 700 hours of processing time in March alone. The CIB is looking to extend this rollout which could help to save 1200 hours of processing time per month by the end of 2020.
This technology is a real game-changer for us.
Phil Glackin
Managing Director, Markets Operations, CIB
This example is just one application for a firmwide tool like EVA that uses reusable components - email parser, classifier and information extractor - like a set of Lego bricks to provide a standardized approach to different solutions. It works alongside existing teams and processes to optimize how they handle process-driven email tasks that otherwise consume time and resources, empowering them to better serve clients through uncertain times.
VA provided a much- needed cushion to our team, seamlessly supporting a 50% volume hike.
Shweta Shetty
Vice President, Markets Ops, CIB
In Wholesale Payments, EVA helped triple the resolution of transaction status queries in one quarter since its introduction late last year. “The team is now helping us advance our strategic routing of transactional inquiries to free up our client services account managers to deliver even more value to our clients,” said Adam Hyde, Global Head of Client Service, Treasury Services and Commercial Card—Wholesale Payments.
Today, EVA is classifying over 490,000 emails each month, and with each new use case, we add to its capabilities: EVA is currently prototyping other full task resolution capabilities with other teams facing large email volumes.
“This is a great example of the firm using machine learning to solve the institutional challenge of many clients still preferring email communication,” said Samik Chandarana, Head of CIB Data & Analytics and Applied AI & ML. “The team has produced something that is easily scalable and already having a material impact.”
For more information, visit the J.P. Morgan Applied AI and ML page.