Horizon Desk

The book
Adaptive learning & portfolio lift
Omnichannel Timeline & Multi-Horizon Projections
PNC Enterprise Data & Cloud Ingestion Hub
Product catalog & rate card

💡 Inspiration

In today's retail banking landscape, trillions of dollars in customer deposits sit idle in zero-interest checking accounts (DDAs). With fintech neo-banks offering aggressive yields, traditional institutions like PNC face deposit flight risks.

At the same time, branch relationship bankers are overwhelmed—managing books of 2,000+ customer accounts manually. They simply lack the time to identify who has surplus liquidity, reach out personally, and comply with strict regulations.

We asked ourselves: What if an autonomous AI agent could act as a nocturnal co-pilot for branch bankers? An engine that scans idle liquidity overnight, crafts personalized, strictly compliant outreach across SMS, Mobile Push, and Email, automatically sweeps authorized savings, and queues high-touch credit opportunities directly for licensed humans. That vision became PNC Horizon Desk.

⚙️ What It Does

PNC Horizon Desk is an autonomous relationship desk and deposit mobilization platform that operates 24/7 across four interconnected layers:

Intelligent Relationship Scanning: Analyzes 480 synthetic customer files, identifying surplus liquidity above emergency buffers while enforcing strict deterministic eligibility checks.
Personalized Omnichannel Outreach: Uses Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet to draft tailored notes for SMS, Push, and Email. The prompt is deterministically locked against rate hallucination, phishing, or credential solicitation, with mandatory TCPA "Reply STOP" opt-out compliance.
Realistic Response Simulation & Fatigue Guards: Accurately simulates the banking world where $\sim 20\% - 35\%$ of notes are left unopened or ignored within 24 hours. Ignored notes trigger an automated 2-cycle cooldown guard to protect clients from message fatigue.
Instant Sweeps & Licensed Banker Queue:
- Deposits: Authorized responses instantly sweep idle checking funds (e.g., $+\$12,500$) into High Yield Savings (3.15% APY) or Fixed CDs (3.60% APY).
- Lending/Credit Cards: Never auto-approved; routed to licensed branch bankers with ElevenLabs Voice AI audio briefings for phone outreach.
Multi-Horizon Projections & Real-Time Velocity:
- Today: Real-time intraday scanner tracing velocity from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM.
- 1 Week: 280-contact cohort mobilizing $\$2.25\text{M}$ via Multi-Armed Bandit optimization.
- 1 Month: Full branch scale ($1,200$ accounts, $\$10.8\text{M}$ deposits).
- 1 Year: 15-branch enterprise deployment ($15,000$ contacts) unlocking $\$142.0\text{M}$ in retained deposits and delivering: $$\text{Net Interest Spread} = \text{Yield on Assets} - \text{Cost of Funds} = +1.85\% \implies \$2.62\text{M Net Income}$$

🛠️ How We Built It

Frontend & Dashboard: Built with Next.js 15.5 (App Router) and TypeScript, styled with industrial PNC brand tokens (#0a192f Navy, #f47321 Orange, #10b981 Emerald).
AI Intelligence: Integrated Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet for dynamic, contextual financial messaging, supported by deterministic fallback templates for guaranteed uptime.
Adaptive Optimization: Implemented an $\epsilon$-greedy Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) that continuously shifts channel and product allocations toward combinations yielding higher useful customer reactions.
Voice Briefing: Integrated ElevenLabs Voice AI to synthesize voice handoff notes for branch bankers reviewing credit card applicants.
Data & Compliance Verification: Built a comprehensive Vitest test suite with 11 automated test suites validating eligibility gates, opt-out enforcement, and immutability of bank history.
Executive Pitch Suite: Created an automated Python presentation compiler (python-pptx) outputting a 16:9 executive deck with high-resolution UI captures.

🥊 Challenges We Faced

Financial Compliance & Hallucination Guardrails: Banking AI cannot hallucinate interest rates or promise approvals. We resolved this by decoupling product eligibility and rate disclosures from the LLM, feeding Claude only pre-approved facts from the rate card.
Simulating Authentic Realism: Early iterations looked too perfect with 100% response rates. We overhauled the simulator to model real human behavior: latency delays (3–15 min), passive unread notifications, and communication fatigue suppression.
Un-Clipped SVG Chart Scaling: Visualizing 40 contacts next to 15,000 contacts without chart bottlenecking required designing custom responsive SVG coordinate projection algorithms with $35\%$ proportional headroom.
State Continuity Across Cycles: Ensuring that clicking "Reach out now" on Cycle 2 progressed from contact 41 to 80 (rather than resetting back to 0) required immutable state snapshots.

🏆 Accomplishments We're Proud Of

Zero-Hallucination Banking Architecture: A system that utilizes generative AI for empathy and tone while leaving critical financial rules to deterministic code.
Enterprise-Ready UI/UX: Live ticker with play/pause, 1x/2x/5x speed controls, and interactive customer drawers.
Proven Financial ROI: A mathematically sound model showing how automated outreach scales from a single branch to $\$142\text{M}$ across a 15-branch regional network.
11/11 Passing Automated Compliance Tests: Proving that zero sensitive customer data is ever solicited or leaked.

📚 What We Learned

How to implement Multi-Armed Bandit algorithms in retail banking to optimize conversion rates ethically.
The vital importance of Human-in-the-Loop boundaries in credit underwriting under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) and ECOA.
Designing responsive, high-performance data visualizations in native SVG without heavy external charting bloat.

🔮 What's Next for PNC Horizon Desk

Core Banking Integration: Direct connectors for FIS, Fiserv, and Jack Henry core banking systems.
Inbound AI Voice Agent: Allowing customers who receive a phone notification to speak directly with an interactive conversational voice assistant to clarify APY tiers.
Wealth Management & Commercial Banking Expansion: Scaling from retail checking sweeps to commercial treasury sweeps and private wealth portfolio rebalancing.