Financial Institutions Will Not Compromise Security for Innovation. Here’s How New-Age NLP Can Help

In the economic world, “trust” has several meanings. It can be a monetary account secured by a third party, it can be financial agreement regarding property holdings, or it can simply mean the quality of trustworthiness that we all seek from our banking institutions.

To build trust, we often crave a human connection. Perhaps your local bank teller instills confidence in your financial choices, or the customer service at a certain credit union inspires you to invest your hard-earned savings with their particular branch.

As banking expands and diversifies, some automation is required. As much as we love the aforementioned local teller, she can’t oversee deposit and withdrawal requests by the thousands every minute of every day. Innovation is inevitable, and it can embrace security as it explores new ways to facilitate the intersection between humanity and economics.

In Tech We Trust

Language is complex. It is not merely a collection of words and punctuation, but a system of emotions. Natural language processing (NLP) is a subset of technology that focuses on interpreting the nuances of how human beings communicate. We talk in slang, abbreviations, and contractions, but the latest gadgets are picking up what we’re laying down.

Your personal device, for example, can understand your requests and process them in the blink of a digital eye. Whether you are asking for a chicken salad recipe or the weekend forecast, AI assistants are becoming more and more sophisticated. Technology is evolving with humanity, reading our emotional cues to best meet our needs.

But the banking sector has lagged behind other industries, all in the name of security. You don’t want your bank to accidentally process an account request due to a misunderstood verbal cue, so financial institutions have set up rigid guidelines to restrict access, even if it means ignoring technology.

But new-age NLP is rewriting the proverbial program.

By creating symbiotic technology to interact more intuitively with the human voice, AI can assist both consumers and banks with ease.

NEW-AGE NLP STUDIES THE INFLECTION OF WORDS RATHER THAN JUST DICTATING THEM DIRECTLY TO TEXT. THE RESULT IS A MORE COMPLETE LANDSCAPE OF VOCAL INTONATIONS THAT BETTER REFLECTS HOW CONSUMERS FEEL RATHER THAN JUST THE PHRASES STUMBLING FROM THEIR MOUTHS.

Your Vocal Fingerprint

Modern life is a jungle of passwords and barriers. You need to remember your PIN, your favorite breakfast food, the name of your first pet, and your first pet’s favorite breakfast food. It can become quite maddening. But vocal recognition can distinguish your vocal pattern from everyone else’s as an added measure of security.

Financial institutions are finally recognizing the need for voice-activated AI in banking. We crave innovation, and we are ready to ask our digital assistants to check our account balance… but we refuse to do so without the proper security measures in place. Technology like Amazon’s Echo and Alexa are rising to the challenge, updating the voice/bank interface to echo (pun intended) our needs as they evolve.

Even smaller companies are benefiting from new-age NLP. More and more credit unions are putting “voice-first” when it comes to accessing and managing personal accounts. Now, you can treat your digital device like your own personal teller. She can recognize you by voice and process your requests with a discerning ear using emotion AI. Sounds like progress!

Deep Data Dive

Banking is all about numbers. In order to be successful, you want more notches in the plus column than the minus column, yet the financial sector, as a whole, has been losing out on valuable data for years.

Enter new-age NLP.

Data generally falls into one of two categories: structured and unstructured. Structured data is often depicted in graphs and charts. It is actionable information that has been compiled for a purpose. Banks assemble structured data to observe economic trends like lending patterns and money flow.

Unstructured data, on the other hand, is harder to wrangle. Every voicemail from a client, for example, falls into the category of unstructured data. Each message may contain valuable insights, but it requires voice recognition to harvest the gems from the roughage.

An estimated 90% of unstructured data goes unused. This means that 9 out of 10 potential consumer interactions fall into the abyss of technological shadows. Banks are often restricted from saving unstructured data for a longer time in deference to user privacy. New-age NLP, however, can help rescue voicemails from the clutches of deletion and put them to great use.

By assessing unstructured data according to sophisticated linguistic patterns, AI can identify what is essential from what is mere digital noise. Accidental voicemails, for instance, can be put in one digital pile while urgent messages are elevated to priority status. Emotion AI can detect a consumer’s tone and bring it to the attention of an account manager. This is just one simple example of how new-age NLP can salvage unstructured data rather than dismissing it or obscuring it for security’s sake.

We never want to sacrifice privacy for convenience. Quick access to banking is wonderful, but it means nothing if bad actors can hack into your accounts. Natural language processing can amplify both security and innovation. Technology can identify your voiceprint as well as your sense of urgency. By harnessing the full potential of new-age NLP, financial institutions can usher in a vibrant tomorrow in the world of responsive – and responsible – banking.

I wrote this piece for aiTechPark.