AI to “change everything” for financial services, says banking panel

The notion that artificial intelligence will transform businesses like financial services is pretty much a given these days. But when the specific features, offerings, and capabilities AI can potentially deliver are considered they are as jaw-dropping as the technology itself.

Panelists at a recent meeting of tech experts hosted by the Consumer Bankers Association predicted that generative AI will bring unimaginable changes to financial services -- an industry not particularly known for fast, efficient, and innovative operations.

“It’s going to change everything,” said Chet Kapoor, chairman and CEO of Data Stax, an AI and data platform company in Santa Clara, Calif. “It is going to change the way people work, it’s going to change pricing, it's going to change workflows. It’s going to completely disrupt retail banking.”

AI to enhance personalization

Kapoor said the real drastic change will come in the form of personalization, in which the data collected and analyzed by AI will produce dual benefits of providing extremely personal services to customers while at the same time maximizing time and profits for companies.

“More information and data results in more personalized insight and better customer service,” he said. “At the same time, more personalized information will allow the bank to offer a better rate and know that the customer is less likely default on the rate the bank’s given them. I think a huge opportunity for both banks and customers.”

Institutions have been using “predictive AI” for years that uses historical data to make assumptions and forecasts on future performance and outcomes. Generative AI combined with Learning Language Models goes even further and can create entirely new data, interfaces, and experiences, that resemble personalized human-created content.

“By analyzing hundreds of thousands of transactions by a customer we can hyper-personalize things right down to a segment of one customer rather than say designing products for an overall customer base,” said Edward Maslaveckas, CEO and co-founder of BUD Financial Ltd., based in the UK.

Personalization 'a huge game-changer'

“We can understand more about the customers who might be looking for a mortgage and then tailor a specific and personal message for every single customer based on that knowledge. Compared to the traditional letters we all get in the mail on a weekly basis offering us loans that aren’t relevant to us, this is a huge game-changer.”

Akita Somani, senior vice president for U.S. Bank who moderated the panel agreed with the night and day differences AI can offer for financial services.

“Decisions and analysis will be made on real-time. real data and not on static demographic information,” she said. “So that’s real helpful.”

The panelists all acknowledged that Generative AI is a rapidly developing technology and there are potential pitfalls in the systems, particularly the instances that in some contexts it will make up or “hallucinate” information. But more felt these were temporary issues that can be eliminated or mitigated with proper oversight and accurate data input.

“There are design decisions that companies and developers and engineers can make to really narrow down the hallucination,” said Julius von Davier, Gen AI specialist at Google.

Doug Bailey is a journalist and freelance writer who lives outside of Boston. He can be reached at [email protected].

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Doug Bailey is a journalist and freelance writer who lives outside of Boston. He can be reached at [email protected].