Automating investor support and citizen engagement in the Philippines

Routing inquiries across 10 departments without a bottleneck

The Philippines’ No Wrong Door policy requires that citizens who contact any government department receive an accurate and timely response – even when their query belongs to a different department. For the SEC, with 10 operational departments, this placed a growing referral burden on frontline staff who were already handling their primary responsibilities alongside incoming citizen queries.

The SEC had an interactive voice response (IVR) phone system, but it was not equipped to handle the volume or cross-department routing complexity required as digital messaging volumes grew. Wait times lengthened, and the operational cost of managing each inquiry manually was rising. The SEC needed a solution that could receive citizen queries on digital channels, interpret intent in Tagalog, Taglish, and English, and direct each interaction to the correct department automatically – without agent intervention on every case.

Proto worked with the SEC to map the workflows across all departments and build CAROL with a cross-department referral architecture. Citizens can begin a conversation on any topic and be automatically directed to the relevant SEC team, with context carried across seamlessly. For cases that require human follow-up, CAROL creates tickets with auto-populated custom fields and tags, reducing the triage workload for agents and giving supervisors a clear view of case volume and status.

High-volume FAQ automation in local languages

A significant share of SEC citizen inquiries are informational – and the range is broad. CAROL’s top inquiry categories span across the full breadth of the SEC’s mandate: monitoring request forms, investor education, lending and financing regulations, corporate governance, reportorial requirements, licensing and examinations, company registration, EFAST platform support, amnesty programmes, and careers and procurement. Handling these manually at SEC’s scale represented a substantial and avoidable cost.

CAROL was deployed with a comprehensive FAQ knowledge base covering all of these service areas, built using Proto’s no-code and LLM-powered agent editor. The AI agent handles inquiries in English, Tagalog, and the mixed Philippine language of Taglish – giving the SEC the localisation depth needed to serve citizens across the country.

Demand on CAROL is not uniform throughout the year. Interaction volumes jump by 15% in March and April, reflecting the Philippines’ corporate filing season – the period when companies submit annual reports, GIS filings, and registration renewals to the SEC. CAROL absorbs this regulatory surge automatically, handling the spike in volume without any change to staffing levels.

Following the success of its text-based deployment, the SEC extended CAROL to voice AI – enabling citizens to interact through spoken language and further expanding access to SEC services beyond text messaging channels.

Structured complaint filing and live agent workflows

Beyond informational inquiries, the SEC handles higher-complexity interactions that require escalation: formal complaints against businesses, requests for regulatory guidance, and fraud reports. These cases require structured data capture, accurate categorisation, and prompt routing to the appropriate agent team.

CAROL supports a guided complaint filing flow that collects the key information needed to process a case – including the nature of the complaint and the relevant company or institution – before routing to the correct SEC department via the integrated ticketing system. Agents receive pre-populated ticket fields and full conversation history, enabling faster resolution without additional manual triage. The platform also supports live chat escalation, with SEC’s agent team able to take over conversations at any point.

As CAROL’s knowledge base has matured, its ability to resolve complex enquiries within the conversation has increased significantly. Around 70% of enquiries that would previously have required formal ticket processing are now resolved entirely within the chat – reducing the administrative burden on agents and shortening resolution times for citizens.

Anti-scam reporting as a citizen protection channel

Investment fraud is a persistent concern in the Philippines, and the SEC identified an opportunity to use CAROL as a rapid-intake channel for investment scam reports. The ability to collect structured reports quickly – including details of the alleged scheme, the financial institution involved, and the affected citizen – can support fund tracing, enforcement action, and inter-agency coordination.

CAROL’s anti-scam reporting capability enables citizens to submit reports conversationally and at scale, at any hour, without requiring agent availability. This use case was recognised as a winner of the G20 TechSprint award in the category for fraud and cybercrime mitigation, acknowledging its potential as a model for regulators in other markets. The SEC is also exploring integration with the Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center (CICC) to enable cross-agency scam report sharing – extending CAROL’s reach across the Philippine government’s broader anti-fraud infrastructure.