How Neo Financial built a support system that can double its customers without doubling costs

Neo Financial is a fast-growing Canadian fintech that’s using technology to make managing money better. Offering credit cards, savings and checking accounts, mortgages, and more in one seamless digital experience, they’re taking banking online.

With no physical branch for customers to walk into, a lot of responsibility rested on Neo’s support team. Every month, they handled around 50,000 conversations across several separate tools. The setup was costly to run and increasingly difficult to manage, making it harder to deliver the fast, seamless experience customers expected. With plans to double their active customer base, the Neo team knew they needed to make a change.

Their first step was to trial Fin, an AI Customer Agent, for support on their frontline. The results were instant, with automated resolutions and customer satisfaction scores improving within the first week. This encouraged the team to streamline their tooling and migrate their entire support operation to Fin and the Intercom helpdesk.

Today, Fin resolves over 20,000 conversations a month, and gets an average CSAT score of 86%. More customers are choosing to chat with Fin than call in and speak to a person, freeing the team up to spend more time on the conversations that need a human touch.

This is a story of how a fast-growing fintech built a support model that scales with its ambitions, without scaling its team alongside it.

Neo holds a high bar for customer service. Because their customers are reaching out with urgent financial questions, every interaction needs to be fast, accurate, and compliant. “We’re dealing with people’s livelihood,” explains Eunice Dunmade, Product Lead at Neo. “They need to pay something or receive a deposit or make a transfer. These are high urgency cases.”

After topping Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50 for three years in a row and growing exponentially, the team was starting to feel the impact of more customers reaching out about more products. A small team of around 20 reps were handling ~50,000 conversations a month across a fragmented tech stack, including Zendesk for ticketing and Amazon Connect for phone support. The setup was operationally complex, costly to maintain, and inefficient for the team to manage.

That strain showed up where it mattered most. Neo’s high bar for customer service was getting harder to maintain as support demand grew faster than the team could realistically hire. Customers were coming in with urgent financial questions, but the team was stretched thin managing that demand across disconnected tools with limited automation. “We could keep adding people as demand grew, but that would only lock us into an increasingly expensive, linear model. We needed a way to scale support without scaling headcount at the same rate,” says Eunice.

With plans to double their active customer base, Neo knew they’d need to update their support infrastructure. This led them to Fin and Intercom.

Bringing a disparate support system together isn’t simple. And making such a big change when people trust you with their money leaves no room for error. Neo needed proof before making any commitments, so they took a phased approach, trialling Fin within their existing support tech first before considering the Intercom helpdesk.

They tested Fin on a set of real customer conversations, and were struck by how well it handled nuance, how accurate it was even with minimal setup, and that it could connect to Neo’s backend systems to answer account-specific questions.

In the first week alone, automated resolutions went up by three to four percentage points and positive CSAT scores climbed from around 50% to nearly 75%. Within three months, Fin was resolving 60% of the conversations it handled.

Having proven the value of Fin, Neo felt confident to expand it across the majority of their chat volume and move ahead with migrating its entire support operation from Zendesk to Intercom. “The results were pretty obvious. Once we saw what Fin was capable of, moving from Zendesk to Intercom felt like the natural next step to keep building on that success,” Eunice says.

With Fin and Intercom available through AWS Marketplace, Neo could move to the new setup through a simpler, more cost-effective path that aligned with their existing AWS investment.

Moving onto Intercom was the most sensitive part of the project. Because Neo’s support is entirely online, they couldn’t afford any downtime. “People’s money and day-to-day lives don’t stop because we’re transitioning platforms,” says Eunice. Neo also operates under strict regulatory and PCI obligations that govern how customer data is handled across every tool and interaction. All of those controls had been built into Zendesk over years and needed to transfer to Intercom seamlessly.

Fin’s Deployment Services team worked closely with Neo to make this happen, helping scope the cutover plan, migrate compliance workflows, and prepare the support team for the new helpdesk. “They basically held our hands through the whole process,” remembers Eunice. “Every problem we brought them, they came back with a solution, usually faster than we expected. The partnership was fantastic. Usually with other vendors, it’s oversell and underdeliver. With the Fin team, they delivered.”

To ensure customers didn’t experience any interruptions, the entire migration was completed during a short overnight window. Everything went to plan. The next morning, Neo’s support operation was fully up and running on Intercom, with no downtime or compliance gaps, full ticket history carried over, and their chat, phone, and AI Agent all connected to one platform.

Neo now runs support through one connected experience. Fin acts as the team’s frontline support within the app customers use to manage their money and the human team uses the Intercom instead of juggling three disconnected systems.

The team has set Fin up to handle a range of customer questions, including the most complex ones. For example, by connecting to Neo’s backend systems, Fin can answer account-specific questions about why a transaction is pending, why a payment was declined, or how a customer can update their account. “Transactions can involve a lot of moving parts,” says Eunice. “What’s really exciting is the progress we’re making with Fin on these account-specific questions.” Importantly, Fin has also proved that the team can trust it in their highly regulated environment. Fin follows the team’s rules for what it can and can’t say when handling customer conversations.

When Fin can’t resolve an issue, or when a conversation needs to be handled by a human for compliance reasons, it instantly hands it off to human support reps, providing them with the full conversation history and context. This ensures customers get one continuous support experience, while Neo’s team keeps everything streamlined across chat and phone, making it easier to run support and keep improving performance over time.

The results of bringing their support into one connected, AI-first system speak for themselves.

Fin is now involved in 96% of chat conversations, and resolves 71% of them end to end, adding up to more than 20,000 resolutions each month. More customers are also choosing to chat to Fin over calling in to speak to a human – with chat volume jumping from around 50% to 70% since launch. For a fintech handling people’s money, that’s a meaningful signal. “Customers will not use chat if they feel like it won't answer their questions,” says Yacine Bara, Chief Customer Officer at NEO. “The fact that more customers are choosing chat is a testament to how well Fin performs.” Fin’s CSAT score has risen from 75% to 86%, and customers regularly leave glowing feedback.

With Fin taking on more of the frontline work, Neo’s human team has been freed up to focus on the conversations that require human judgment, ensuring every customer has the best experience.

This new support model has primed Neo for their next stage of growth. “We want to double our active customer base,” says Eunice. “Fin gives us the capacity to support that growth while allowing our team to focus on the conversations where human expertise matters most.”

Neo is already looking at where Fin and Intercom can take their support next. They’ve started testing Fin Voice to bring the same speed and quality customers get in chat to phone support. “We’ve looked at a few voice AI products, and Fin is already standing out,” says Eunice. “It’s giving more accurate answers, and compared to the alternatives we’ve tested, the experience feels more natural.”

The team are also looking at connecting Fin to even more of their internal systems, allowing it to take on an even broader range of complex, multi-step workflows and actions, like account updates and mailing address changes.

But the bigger ambition is proactive support: reaching customers before they need to ask for help. The team wants to use Fin and Intercom to identify moments where customers may be getting stuck in their journey and step in earlier. “We expect customers to go from one point in our lifecycle to another in five days,” Eunice explains. “If we see a customer isn't reaching that milestone, we want Fin to proactively reach out and ask, ‘Hey, do you need help?’”

As Neo looks ahead, AI is becoming the foundation of great customer experience. “Fintech teams are held to a higher standard, but this is where the world is going,” says Yacine. “If you don’t want to be left behind, you need to find the right AI tools and use cases – the ones that let you scale safely while creating real value for both customers and the business.”