BANKS' GROWING RELIANCE ON CHATBOTS TO HANDLE CUSTOMER SERVICE TASKS WORRIES CONSUMER WATCHDOG

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 this week, where the bureau lays out a number of concerns about the growing use of chatbots by banks to handle routine customer service requests.

The CFPB worries that banks or loan-servicing companies may cut back on human customer service employees and push an increasing number of routine tasks to Al. Further, the regulator says poorly designed chatbots could run afoul of federal laws that govern how debts are collected or how personal information is being used.

"If firms poorly deploy these services, there's a lot of risk for widespread customer harm, said Rohit Chopra, director of the CFPB, in an interview.

For several years, banks have been handling more and more customer service requests with chatbots, often with female-sounding names like Sandi for Santander, Amy from HSBC, or Eno at Capital One.