KOHO saves $8M with Forethought Voice

Canadian fintech KOHO helps customers live better financial lives through intuitive digital banking. Delivering empathetic customer service is central to that mission.

“What makes us unique is that we have a specific level of care when it comes to our users,” says Colin Smyth, Product Manager of the Support Team at KOHO. “The traditional banking experience has left many of them feeling more like a number.”

To bring that same level of care to every customer interaction, KOHO turned to Forethought AI agents by Zendesk to deliver more personal, human conversations at scale.

“We’ve started thinking about Voice as almost an extension of the brand,” Smyth says. “It’s another channel on top of email and SMS that helps us reach users, understand their pain points—and unblock them.”

After four years as a Forethought customer, KOHO expanded into Voice in 2025, initially using it for outbound customer reactivation campaigns. The goal was to automate outreach without losing the feel of a one-on-one conversation—and the pilot delivered immediate results, saving the company more than $8M in a single year.

In KOHO’s strongest-performing reactivation campaign, AI-powered outbound calls increased active funded accounts by 23 percent, nearly doubling the performance of comparable email campaigns.

Finding a more personal way to reach customers

Email and SMS were becoming less effective, while human-led outbound calling was too expensive to scale. Voice gave KOHO the immediacy of a phone conversation without the cost and complexity of staffing a large outbound calling team.

Instead of simply automating phone calls, KOHO wanted conversations that felt natural. After evaluating several voice AI providers, the company chose Forethought because conversational AI had evolved enough for customer-facing conversations—and because Forethought proved to be a collaborative partner.

“We felt comfortable launching because we knew the experience had reached the point where we didn’t need extreme oversight,” Smyth says. “And we had a true working relationship with the Forethought team—their willingness to collaborate, keep us in the fold, and be incredibly responsive to how our team was working made all the difference.”

Launching Voice without adding complexity

As a fintech handling sensitive financial information, KOHO partnered with Forethought to establish AI guardrails, redact personally identifiable information (PII), and ensure Voice stayed within clearly defined policies.

“The team was really responsive when it came to reviewing some of the early transcripts and helping us flag where data should be redacted and where it shouldn’t,” Smyth says. “It really gave us peace of mind.”

By connecting Forethought Voice to Braze, KOHO’s customer engagement platform, the support and lifecycle teams could launch AI-powered outbound calls just like email campaigns—with little engineering support. When KOHO later transitioned from Intercom to Kustomer, Forethought adapted easily, a seamless switch for employees and customers.

“It was very straightforward,” Smyth says. “Everybody who launched this had zero technical skills outside of some of the easy stuff, so it was relatively hands-off for our engineering team.”

Turning conversations into customer insight

Voice quickly became more than another engagement channel. Customers were often more candid with the AI than with human agents, giving KOHO a clearer understanding of why people weren’t reactivating their accounts.

“Even when we don’t see the expected lift in activation, what’s been really helpful is that it acts as another voice-of-the-customer channel,” Smyth says. “It’s helping us get to the real product blockers much faster and with a much more authentic lens.”

Building the future of customer support

What began as an extension of the brand is now a core part of KOHO’s customer experience strategy. The company has expanded from one AI Voice agent to seven, with plans to continue growing the program.

“We think there’s an opportunity to bake this into our app as more of a concierge experience,” Smyth says. “Something that’s less of a support channel and more of an active participant in your KOHO experience.”

Instead of replacing existing channels, Voice has become a new way for KOHO to engage customers.

“It’s essentially unlocked a new workstream for us,” Smyth says.