How SoFi turned customer support from a bottleneck into a competitive advantage.

When you're a company built on the promise of helping people achieve financial independence, every customer interaction either builds that trust or breaks it. For SoFi, a digital finance company serving more than 13.7 million members across its checking, savings, investing, lending, and other products, member experience isn't a nice-to-have—it's the entire business model.

Their first core value makes this explicit: "if we take care of our members' interests, it will best serve our interests." In an industry where trust is currency and "member-centric" is what every competitor claims, SoFi knew their support experience had to actually deliver on that promise—for everything, at any time, at the scale of millions of members managing complex financial lives.

SoFi’s previous chat experience could handle basic support questions, but the company wanted to offer members more dynamic, comprehensive help, especially during peak times—paydays, tax season, market volatility. SoFi wanted to raise the bar for customer experiences.

Choosing a partner that could deliver on both experience and compliance

SoFi evaluated their options methodically, ultimately choosing Sierra for several critical factors: the ability to build agents that could resolve complex requests end-to-end, infrastructure that could scale across high-volume financial interactions, and complete transparency for internal teams.

But a final factor made the choice clear—Sierra was purpose-built for regulated environments. As a regulated financial services company, SoFi must comply with industry regulations while also ensuring members can accurately and easily obtain service wherever they are. Sierra’s platform has enabled SoFi to deliver on both.

Supporting members across their entire financial lives

The AI agent powered by Sierra now handles support across SoFi's complete product ecosystem, including: banking, credit cards, investing, and lending. Members can get help with account balances, understand their credit card rewards, get guidance on investment options, check loan application status—all through natural conversation with an agent that is dynamic, flexible, and actually understands their complex needs. The agent also covers travel benefits and workplace financial wellness topics, providing comprehensive support for all aspects of members’ financial lives. One member summed up the experience by saying, “Wow. Impressive responses as AI.”

The agent connects directly to SoFi's internal APIs with strict guardrails protecting sensitive data and meeting compliance requirements at every step. SoFi's teams can now inspect reasoning traces, watch how the agent performs during live interactions, and make targeted improvements.

From bottleneck to competitive advantage

Three months post-launch, the transformation was undeniable. The AI agent achieved 61% containment, handling more than 50,000 conversations weekly. Chat-contained NPS improved significantly by 33 points.

More members were getting instant resolution instead of waiting in queues. Support teams were freed up to handle the most complex cases. And SoFi had built the foundation to scale support as fast as they could roll out new products and features.

"In financial services, trust is everything," says Laura Fayer, SoFi's VP of Member. "Every interaction either builds that trust or erodes it. What Sierra has enabled is support that actually scales without sacrificing the experience. Members get instant resolution. Our team focuses on complex challenges. And we can confidently roll out new products knowing the support infrastructure will scale with our rapidly evolving product offerings."

In an industry where "customer service" leaves many people unsatisfied, SoFi is proving that AI—when built specifically to solve members’ challenges and adhere to complex regulatory requirements—can make financial services feel more human, not less. That's what happens when you refuse to choose between great experiences and regulatory compliance: you deliver both.