The Y Combinator-backed startup called cultural, is bringing AI to the banking world in a surprising way: it's putting AI robots on the phone with businesses and consumers. The startup began by offering an AI-powered service that negotiated debt collections on behalf of consumers, helping about 70% of customers resolve their collections and increase their credit rating, according to feedback. Now, Cambio is bringing that technology to banks and credit unions as an API that can help them with sales calls.
Change comes from Blesson Abraham (CEO), an entrepreneur with a background in banking. Previously, Abraham was co-founder and CEO of SavvyIntel, a SaaS analytics solution for credit unions, acquired in 2017 by TruStage. After his departure, Abraham came up with the idea of helping people who were struggling to improve their finances with a banking app, something he understood personally, as he went into debt when he initially founded his latest startup.
“I came out victorious, but there are one in three American adults who have difficulties like that,” he explains. “So we built Cambio with that premise.”
When it was created in 2021, Cambio was conceived as a neobank aimed at this underserved market. However, Abraham found that Cambio users were more interested in its tools for developing better credit habits. After the startup was accepted into the Y Combinator accelerator in 2022, the team decided to rebuild the app and pivot it to reflect its new focus on helping consumers get out of debt.
Over the past year, Cambio's service reached almost 90.000 users and the app's business model went from freemium to paid.
One of its latest features was driven by the popularity of ChatGPT. Clients asked Cambio if he could help them resolve their collection debts.
“With ChatGPT, one of the cool things was that we could train people in real time as they spoke to their default recovery agents,” Abraham says. "So we came up with a solution within our app where you would call your debt collector, our robots would listen to the call and tell you in real time what to say back to you."
The founder says this was allowed because the debt collectors were already recording the calls, so it wasn't a problem for an AI to "listen in."
That experience then led clients to ask Cambio if it could handle calls on their behalf and negotiate debt reduction for them. The company realized it could do this by first obtaining a signed power of attorney and then calling debt collectors using AI.
“We started very, very confident: people who wanted to pay the full amount of the debt and wanted the irregularity to come out of their collections report,” says Abraham.
Cambio found early success on this path, with seven out of 10 customers improving their credit scores within 60 days of making the call with the AI bots.
Robots Artificial Intelligence Exchange will tell the collector who they are calling on behalf of, and when the collector requests proof, they will email the power of attorney documentation. Because the calls focused on a simple use case (paying off the debt in full), it was relatively easy to keep the conversation going. within the limits of that negotiation.
That's not to say there weren't struggles at first. Abraham says that Cambio initially had to deal with hallucinations of AI, but this improved over time as more calls were made.
Cambio's ability to handle debt collection calls soon led the company to its next idea: an AI, called AviaryAI, which banks and credit unions can use to call their customers. This technology uses AI to assist with sales and outreach calls that banks use to help cross-sell products to their customers, such as alerting them about a new checking account product, credit card, debt protection service, and further.
Although the FCC recently declared AI-initiated robocalls illegal, Cambio believes its AI bots will be allowed. The company also consults with legal counsel regarding the nature of its bots and applicable laws.
“Banks, credit unions, and even our first group of customers are actually insurance companies; I chose these because they are highly regulated industries,” says Abraham. He says the company is also trying to work with regulators by proactively introducing them to its technology and explaining how it's built, how the bots arrive, and what they can and can't do.
"When we make these phone calls, we let people know that you're talking to a virtual assistant," he says. “It's not as simple as just…putting a voice into an LLM and people listen to it.”
Calls can start the conversation with the customer, but can also bounce back to a real person, if desired. AI-powered calls are as successful as calls made by sales teams, where 5% to 10% of calls are answered, Cambio says.
“If you compared it to a human, it actually matches its effectiveness or, if not, in certain use cases, it is even better,” says Abraham.
The current experience involves three different bots: one that makes the call, another that watches that bot to make sure it doesn't need to escalate, and a third bot that monitors the entire call, to analyze things like tonality, what the caller said. client, etc. It essentially provides a quality control perspective on the effectiveness of the call.
The technology is being tested by a handful of early adopters, including Envisant, Encurage Financial Network, Agenium y Skyla Credit Union.
With the move to the B2B space, the Change app for consumers is not going away, but the company can focus its monetization efforts on the API.
To support its growth, Cambio has also raised a $3 million seed funding round from Builders, DVC, EGR Partners, Envisant, Encurage Financial Network, Goodwater Capital, Leonis Investissement, Sandhill Capital, YC and other angel investors.
“At DVC we are excited to support the Cambio team in their mission to introduce much-needed technology into consumer financial products, with the goal of creating transparency and empowering people to better manage debt and rebuild their credit scores,” he said. Marina Davidova, managing partner of DVC. “They demonstrate not only a clear vision, but also the ability to execute it relentlessly, creating easy-to-use solutions powered by sophisticated AI.”
