About the Company

VR TeilhaberBank was created in 2021 from the merger of three cooperative banks and, with a balance sheet total of 5.2 billion euros, is one of the largest VR banks in Bavaria. More than 91,000 “shareholders” form the basis of the financial institution.

VR TeilhaberBank at a Glance

• Industry: Financial services
• Employees: over 700
• Market/Region: strongly anchored in the Nuremberg metropolitan region
• Target group: Private and corporate customers in the mid-market segment, cooperative members

Key Facts about the Project

• Implementation duration: 3 to 6 months
• Three functional areas: Mia GPT, Mia Search, Mia Assistants
• Data protection compliant hosting: Pure EU hosting by LoyJoy and LLM via Microsoft Azure in the EU
• Demonstrable reduction of search efforts in information retrieval
• Project management by internal innovation team, supported by LoyJoy experts

Initial Situation

After the merger, the cooperative bank faced a typical challenge: How can knowledge and work instructions from three organizations be efficiently bundled, kept up-to-date, and made accessible?

There were the following central problem areas:

• Distributed knowledge sources: over 1,000 PDF documents, websites, blogs, product information and the intranet
• High search effort: Employees often needed 5 to 30 minutes for information research
• Earlier rule-based chatbot was not very powerful, inflexible and not scalable
• Technological objective: Integration of a secure, generative AI solution that supports both classic, rule-based workflows and generative AI use cases

Already in 2021, the first internal chatbot “Mia” was introduced. This was then replaced by the LoyJoy platform and its generative AI from 2023 onwards and further developed on it. VR TeilhaberBank was a real pioneer here: While many financial institutions were just beginning to deal with the potential of generative AI at that time, VR TeilhaberBank already had its AI-based conversational solution with LoyJoy in implementation.

The Project

Solution Concept & Technical Setup

In close cooperation with LoyJoy, the existing chatbot “Mia” was converted into a modular, AI-supported solution – directly integrated into the intranet and accessible to all employees.

Special attention was paid to handling sensitive information in the banking environment: Mia works completely GDPR-compliant, is hosted in the EU thanks to LoyJoy, and meets all requirements regarding information security, data protection and compliance.

Through in-house operation, full data sovereignty remains with the bank, external processing by third-party systems is excluded. System prompts and role control were also designed so that sensitive content can be processed safely and contextually accurate. Additionally, employees receive a prominent notice directly in the interface not to enter personal data.

The solution consists of three sub-areas:

1. Mia GPT – Context-sensitive Response Intelligence

Generative AI, enriched with systematic prompts: considers role, department and communication guidelines

Used for:

• General questions
• Text creation (e.g. customer letters, website content, blog texts)
• Translations in the consulting context

Operation exclusively on EU servers with encryption for data storage and transfer: GDPR-compliant, no external data processing

2. Mia Search – Semantic Knowledge System

Intelligent querying of all internal data sources and thousands of documents

Content:

• Work instructions
• Internal blog
• Product documentations
• External websites

Compressed answers with linking to the original source

Relevant use cases:

• “What applies to mobile working?"
• "What regulation exists for sick leave certification?"
• "How does the process of a name change work?”

Prompting workshops for employees for internal introduction

3. Mia Assistants – Specialized GPTs for Daily Work

Subject-specific AI modules for individual use cases

Examples:

• Customer communication in bank tone
• Web texts in corporate wording
• Translations for international consulting

Goal: Standardization, quality assurance & time savings

The LoyJoy Solution

• Maximum reduction of search time: previously up to 30 minutes, to sometimes just a few seconds
• Efficiency increase: If you assume a cost saving of only 5 euros per search process, this adds up to a considerable calculated saving. In addition, there is the considerable time saving.
• Higher quality: The integrated knowledge structure also improves the maintenance of content – errors, duplications and outdated information become visible
• High acceptance: internal surveys show broad approval
• Relief of internal expert teams: Standard questions no longer need to be answered individually by the specialist department
• Strengthening of innovation culture: including through “AI Festival” and “AI Campus” with gamified formats, lectures and prompter challenges

Thanks to specialized LoyJoy templates for Volksbanken, many use cases can now be implemented even more efficiently. Further success cases together with the Cooperative Financial Group are:

• R+V Insurance
• Westerwaldbank
• Evangelische Bank

What’s next?

The next steps in the AI project of VR Teilhaber Bank focus on the targeted further development of the so-called “Mia Assistants”. The goal is to expand the existing use cases and enable even more specialized applications in the future – for example through individualized writing assistants for customer communication, web texts or internal translations. In addition, the expansion of the knowledge base is continuously reviewed and flanked by systematic quality control in order to keep all internal information sources consistent and up-to-date in the long term.