Cake Digital Bank identifies two key benefits of using Google Cloud services. The first is fast, reliable, and unlimited autoscaling, which speeds up the product development process and shortens time-to-market. The speed of releasing new features on Cake Digital Bank is calculated in days rather than in months, as it would be in a traditional banking model. 

Next, through use of Vertex AI, alongside BigQuery as its machine learning-enabled data warehouse, the bank's data science team enjoys world-class tools to build AI models in diverse operational segments. These include researching new products, assessing credit applications, and recommending tailored products for each customer. To date, Cake Digital Bank has developed 50 AI models in house using the most advanced Google Cloud AI technologies.

A considerable challenge in Cake Digital Bank's evolution was meeting Vietnam's strict regulatory biometric requirements for customer authentication. With effect from July 2024, State Bank of Vietnam mandates end-to-end biometric verification for financial transactions. These requirements led Cake Digital Bank to leverage Vertex AI to develop and roll out an eKYC and biometric verification system called FaceAuthen, the sole solution in the Vietnamese market that has been certified with iBeta Quality Assurance. Today, the bank's FaceAuthen is being used by 15M+ users in Vietnam.

Additionally, Cake Digital Bank sought to improve customer service performance and productivity through a chatbot that handles natural, intelligent, and personalized conversations. Cake Digital Bank employed Vertex AI, using Gemini Flash as its fast and nimble generative AI solution, to create the chatbot that was awarded Best AI Technology Implementation by the Asian Banker in June 2024.

One of the factors Cake Digital Bank valued in Vertex AI was that it came with large language models (LLMs) such as PaLM 2 and Gemini, both of which it found excellent at understanding and generating natural text.

Thanks to these LLMs, Cake Digital Bank enabled its Gato chatbot to understand context and continuously learn from user interactions to improve performance over time. As such, Gato is able to provide personalized experiences to each user based on interaction history and preferences.

"Gemini Flash is a powerful tool for creating intelligent and efficient chatbots,” says Tu. “One of our key goals is understanding customers, and Gemini Flash helps our chatbot to understand even complex language patterns, tones, and emotions, allowing it to provide the most appropriate recommendations to the customer."

In the future, Cake Digital Bank intends to create an AI-driven digital ecosystem with leading partners from many fields such as: telecommunications, insurance, retail, ecommerce, entertainment to fine-tune its understanding of customer behavior in diverse sectors. This will enable it to provide customers with the most suitable products and services for their financial needs.

"Cake Digital Bank's development of a comprehensive digital financial ecosystem will help customers access financial services at any touch point with the bank, including external parties,” says Tu. “That will open a world of possibility for customers and partners. Creative uses of Vertex AI, BigQuery, and Gemini Flash are crucial to this mission.”