The SEC faced several challenges in their automating their manual citizen engagement workflow across 10 independent departments. The AI agent solution would need to train from these workflow without hallucination, and maintain constant compliance with the Philippine government's No Wrong Door policy whereby citizens can approach any department and get their request answered. This organisational structure requires citizen queries to be forwarded to the appropriate department for timely resolution to ensure transparency, accountability, fair competition, and investor protection. In effect, this places the referral burden on the SEC staff in addition to their primary job responsibilities. Despite already using an interactive voice response (IVR) phone system, managing the increasing volume of citizen inquiries with the added referral burden was expanding wait times and operational costs. The SEC recognised the need to augment their manual system with a localised and secure AI agent with the following requirements:

• Escalation of complex chats and tickets to live agents
• Deflection of >50% of inquiries to protect live agent capacity
• Understanding of Tagalog, Cebuano, and the mixed language of Taglish
• Text and voice messaging support for website, Messenger and Viber
• Full compliance with the Philippine's data protection laws
• Conformity with the Philippine's unique procurement process
• Ability to keep the deployment within a reliable, fixed cost range

The SEC agency brand also emphasised efficiency and a technology-first mandate. So addressing these seven requirements would require an AI provider that could bridge the gap between public sector constraints and innovation.

The SEC selected Proto given its experience with the country's central bank for an AI-based consumer protection deployment. Together, SEC and Proto developed the AI agent named CAROL (Customer Care Online Assistant) with the following steps:

• Workflow mapping with to automate tasks such as corporate registration checks and policy questions
• Dialogue building using Proto’s no-code and LLM-powered AI agent editor to answer FAQs and perform cross-department referrals
• Ticket creation with auto-population of custom fields and tags for streamlined live agent workflows
• Omnichannel deployment across the SEC website and Messenger and Viber channels
• Training and onboarding for SEC's live agent team to respond to chat and ticket escalations

The Proto solution now supports a full range of investor and citizen engagement capabilities tailored to the SEC's operations:

• ‍Account inquiry automation that allows customers to verify their identity and check their balance through messaging apps. This relies on a secure API connection to FINCA’s banking system.
• Digital customer onboarding with messaging-based account creation steps, including eligibility checks and documentation. This reduces branch traffic and simplifies the new customer experience, especially in rural areas.
• Transaction security measures that require customers to verify their identity using one-time codes sent to their mobile numbers. This adds a layer of security while maintaining ease of access via chat.‍
• Financial literacy where FINCA customers receive tips on budgeting, saving, and responsible borrowing. This uses proactive chat to highlight available products and best practices

Beyond these automation wins, Proto's innovation with SEC is focused on using the CAROL AI agent as a critical channel for scam reports. Rapid collection of these reports about investment schemes can facilitate anti-scam centre capability for fund tracing and freezing. This technology was the winner of the G20 TechSprint category for fraud and cybercrime mitigation.