Startup call powered by AY Combinator Cambio is bringing AI to the banking world in a surprising way: It’s putting AI bots on the phone with companies and consumers. The startup began by offering an AI-powered service that negotiated debt collections on behalf of consumers, which helped about 70 percent of customers resolve their collections and raise their credit scores, he says. Now, Cambio is bringing this technology to banks and credit unions as an API that can help them with sales calls.
Cambio comes from Blesson Abraham (CEO), an entrepreneur with a background in banking. Previously, Abraham was the co-founder and CEO of SavvyIntel, a SaaS analytics solution for credit unions, which was acquired in 2017 by TruStage. After getting out, Abraham had the idea to help people who were struggling to improve their finances with a banking app—something he understood personally, as he was charged when he originally founded his last startup.
“I came off the top, but there’s one in three adults in the U.S. who have these struggles,” she explains. “So we built Cambio with that premise in mind.”
When it was created in 2021, Cambio was envisioned as a startup bank targeting this underserved market. However, Abraham found that Cambio’s users were more interested in its tools for building better credit habits. After the startup was accepted into the Y Combinator accelerator in 2022, the team decided to rebuild the app and pivot to reflect its new focus on helping consumers get out of debt.
Over the past year, Cambio’s service has reached nearly 90,000 users, and the app’s business model has changed from freemium to paid.
Image Credits: Cambio
One of its newer features was prompted by the popularity of ChatGPT. Customers were asking Cambio if it could help them solve their accounts receivable debt.
“With ChatGPT, one of the cool things was that we could guide people in real time as they talked to their collectors,” says Abraham. “So we came up with a solution in our app where you would call your collector, our bots would listen to the call and tell you in real time what to answer.”
The founder says this was allowed because the calls were already recorded by the collectors, so it wasn’t a problem for an AI to “listen”.
This experience led to customers asking Cambio if it could just handle the calls on their behalf and negotiate the debt for them. The company realized it could do this by first obtaining a signed power of attorney and then calling the collectors using AI.
“We started out very, very safe – people who wanted to pay their full amount [of debt] — who wanted the item out of their collection report,” Abraham says.
Cambio has found initial success going this route, with seven out of 10 customers improving their credit scores within 60 days of making the call with the AI bots.
Cambio’s AI bots will tell the collector who they are calling on their behalf, and when the collector asks for proof, they send the authorization documents via email. Because the calls focused on a simple use case—paying off the debt in full—it was relatively easy to keep the conversation within the guardrails of this negotiation.
That’s not to say there weren’t struggles in the beginning. Abraham says that, initially, Cambio had to deal with artificial intelligence hallucinationsbut 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 can be used by banks and credit unions to call their customers. This technology uses AI to help with sales and outreach calls that banks use to help cross-sell products to their customers, such as alerting them to a new checking account product, credit card, debt protection service and but.
Although the FCC recently outlawed AI-initiated robocalls, 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 clients are actually insurance companies – I chose the trio of highly regulated industries,” Abraham points out. He says the company is also trying to work with regulators by proactively introducing its technology to them and explaining how it’s built, how they approach bots, and what bots can and can’t do.
“When we make these phone calls, we’re letting people know you’re talking to a virtual assistant,” he says. “It’s not as simple as just…putting a voice on an LLM and people listening.”
Calls can start the conversation with the customer, but can also bounce to a real person if you wish. AI-powered calls are just as successful as calls made by sales teams, where it receives around 5-10% of calls, Cambio claims.
“If you compare it to a human, we actually match it or, if not, in some use cases, even better,” Abraham says.
The experience today involves three different bots: one that makes the call, another that observes that bot to make sure it doesn’t need escalation, and a third bot that watches the entire call, to analyze things like intonation, what the customer etc. on — essentially offers a quality control perspective on the effectiveness of the call.
The technology is being tested by a few early adopters, including Visionary, Encourage the financial network, Agenium and Skyla Credit Union.
By moving into the B2B space, the Cambio app for consumers it won’t stop, but the company can focus its monetization efforts on the API.
To support its growth, Cambio also raised a seed round of $3 million in funding from Builders, DVC, EGR Partners, Envisant, Encourage Financial Network, Goodwater Capital, Leonis Investissement, Sandhill Capital, YC and other angel investors.
“We at DVC are excited to support the Cambio team in their mission to bring much-needed technology to consumer financial products, with the goal of creating transparency and empowering individuals to better manage debt and rebuild their credit scores,” said DVC CEO Marina Davidova. “They demonstrate not only a clear vision, but also the ability to relentlessly execute on it, creating user-friendly solutions powered by sophisticated AI.”
