Enhancing Productivity and Innovation Using Amazon Bedrock with Coast Capital Savings

Founded in 1940, Coast Capital Savings is a Canadian credit union with almost 600,000 members and nearly 27 billion dollars in assets.

In 2023, Coast Capital Savings started exploring generative AI while establishing a formal governance framework to protect sensitive data. Working alongside AWS to explore “the art of the possible,” the team adopted a “think big and scale back” approach. The goal was to create a minimum viable product that could deliver immediate value and showcase its potential. “AWS has always been a leader in the cloud and data space,” says Jason Hikida, vice president of information technology and digital banking at Coast Capital Savings. “The company is willing to make investments to drive innovation and customer success.”

The team began by developing a staff-facing chatbot for the lending team. Coast Capital Savings has a large intranet, making answers to specific questions difficult to find. Using Amazon Bedrock, the team worked overtime to build a working prototype in 3 weeks, later expanding it to include content related to human resources. This expansion created the basis for a valuable self-service tool for the entire organization.

Using a serverless architecture, Coast Capital Savings iteratively developed the prototype, initially adopting Amazon Kendra, an intelligent enterprise search service, before evolving to Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases, which give foundation models and agents contextual information from private data sources. It chose Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases for the product’s ease of implementation and low cost. The team discovered that data quality, not technology, was the key challenge, so it undertook a data cleanup initiative to improve the accuracy and relevance of the chatbot’s responses.

With the initial chatbot, employees can find answers quickly using natural language, which has the potential to reduce human resources queries by 25–30 percent so staff can focus on specialized tasks. The chatbot’s responses link to source information for deeper research. Coast Capital Savings plans to expand the chatbot so that frontline staff can search more content. “The newly developed chatbot helps our staff complete tasks more efficiently by providing quick access to accurate and up-to-date information when they need it,” says Hikida. “By streamlining information retrieval, we can foster a more agile and informed workforce.”

Coast Capital Savings is exploring more ways to increase productivity, such as developing application code and generating automated test cases. The organization also plans to release a member-facing chatbot to advance financial literacy and provide more comprehensive financial planning services. “As we make further investments in generative AI using AWS, we can grow and multiply the value that we bring to the organization,” says Hikida.