How AI is Transforming the Financial Services Industry

It is a fact that Artificial Intelligence has become very popular during the last few months. It constantly appears in the mass media and people are very curious to know more about it. During the last 6 months, I have experienced it myself when talking about the company I joined half a year ago. A lot of this buzz is about the possibilities that it will bring in the future. For example, research from Accenture indicates that “by 2035, AI could double economic growth rates in 20 countries, and boost labour productivity by up to 40 percent”. However, what I like is looking at the current use of this technology in specific industries, such as in the Financial Services. Below are a few examples on how AI is changing this industry.

A few months ago, MasterCard announced that they had put in place a new AI system to detect fraud. Every year a few hundred billion credit card transactions take place around the world. This is a lot of transactions and detecting fraud is a real challenge. MasterCard’s new AI system improves the accuracy of real-time approvals and reduces false declines, which addresses a major source of frustration for consumers: the hassle and embarrassment factor when a perfectly legitimate transaction is rejected.

UBS is working on several pilots with AI technologies to be able to give better advice to their customers. By the means of machine learning and big data analysis, they want to predict how the market will behave in some situations. This technology can also be incorporated to what the industry calls “robo-advisors”, which are automated services that help investment wealth managers to take better decisions.

Widiba, a new bank that appeared in Italy in September 2014, is a technology driven organisation that wants to provide an excellent service through their powerful online and digital platform. They implemented Widdy, a conversational digital employee that can be enabled when clicking on the contact button from their main website (“contattaci” in Italian). The intelligent and automated service is capable of sophisticated understanding of complex issues and is able to continually learn from these interactions. Widdy remembers interrupted conversations and is able to understand the context of a conversation following its natural flow. The bank has won many innovation awards as well as the Best Customer Experience recognition from EFMA in 2016.

CaixaBank, the leading retail bank in Spain with a 25.7% of market share, uses AI technology to find answers to foreign trade questions. This solution allows non-expert employees to be able to help customers in complex issues. Before implementing this solution, the Foreign Trade Department was a bottleneck and was not capable to support all the call centre requests and, as a result, was not able to provide a good customer service. The cognitive AI solution learns from unstructured data on foreign trade and is capable to answer specific questions.

Machine learning. Big data. Robo-advisors. Natural language. Chatbots. Personal assistants. Cognitive computing. These are just a few examples of how AI is transforming the Financial Services industry. I look forward to seeing what other AI use cases will be able to see during the following years. And the best news is that I will be able to discover it from the leading Natural Language AI company, Artificial Solutions.