hi and welcome back to Tech Talk I'm Ken Mingis executive editor at computer
world I'm here with computer worlds Lucas Mearian today's topic financial
services and AI I'm gonna find out what's going on from Lucas stick around
okay so Lucas thanks for being here I know you've just started digging into
this this topic for a story that you're working on but I guess you're finding
out that AI is is moving into is moving away from pilot projects into real world
projects in some financial services and I just wanted to find out well what do
you know not much noel tantrum actually what I
learned was the banking industry is is really high on AI right now they're
spending billions of dollars on this there are a second actually only to the
retail marketplace and but part of the problem is that a lot of the spending is
being done without a real business use case it's it's the trendy the hot
technology there are use cases out there but in many cases being deployed for the
wrong reasons that's number one okay number two there are mainly pilots out
there right now even the large banks are mainly focused on pilots but that is
expected to shift beginning this year and moving out into the next 2 3 4 years
we should be seeing more production systems going into going live so mainly
what is the technology about the vast majority of it is being used to create
more efficiency in the customer relationship process with a bank so if
somebody comes to a banking website or is doing some online banking whatever
the the AI or the machine learning whatever the the system that they're
they're rolling out is designed to basically cater to those customers more
efficiently I guess yeah effectively yeah
so you can either be directed to buy a chatbot to instead of using phone using
the website which can be more efficient you can get simple or mundane questions
answered by a lot of these chat bots so chat back technology is probably at the
top of the list but then you have other technology that's helping to tie
together these disparate systems within banks these two spirit CRM system
the cross lines of business so right now their component alized they don't talk
to each other so you don't really get a full picture of the customers history
with that bait for example a customer may have checking account savings
account credit cards that are tied together but then they want to take out
a mortgage and that's a completely different business unit and that
information isn't tied to their savings their checking or their credit card
accounts so they want to get a more complete picture so that they can not
only be more efficient in servicing the customer they can anticipate that
customers eat well I mean it sounds like it's a perfect example of trying to
break down the silos within the financial services businesses or
industries or banks and then figuring out what the customer is doing based on
what they've done in the past and then upselling them exactly either a new
credit card or a new credit limit or as you say a mortgage or a car loan or
something like that and using it's using what the customer has already done in
the past it's interesting that it that it's it doesn't seem like banks have
already been on that I'm surprised that they haven't figured out a way to sort
of track that stuff and and make it work for them already well to a low level
kind of a I don't want to say dumb but but not a highly intelligent system it
has been in place for quite some time so you might get pitched a credit card with
a higher credit limit just based on your recent credit card history with the
company that's pretty simple stuff but the credit cards could offer certain
benefits you know mileage for example uh points bad points back and but they they
need to know your history in order to know what to pitch you versus just
blindly giving you something based on your credit report okay and so what what
banks and financial institutions have been doing is basically doing all these
little test projects over the last few years which they're still doing but the
implication there is that they've now gotten enough data from customers and
how this system would work that they feel prepared to begin rolling this out
in real world yeah yeah they're calling big data down to the point where they
can start offering more customized products and in many cases that's and of
course that's not the only area it's being used and you also have a lot of
regulatory requirement out there that financial institutions
are required to comply with such as know your customer and anti-money laundering
rules and in order to do that today it can take as long as six weeks to know
determine a customer's true identity really yes we can take six weeks well
we're not just talking about one human being we oftentimes it's a Conklin
corporation a corporation they were doing business with and yeah it can take
that long because you're not only searching internal records for the
company you're searching external information about that company or in
some cases a person machine learning and AI technology can actually reduce that
to a number of days giving a feedback to the compliance officer who then can look
at that information it just reduces the labor load on what was before of a
pretty manual tasks okay so I can see is there do we have any sense yet whether
these whether the AR or the machine learning that's going to be used at say
Bank a would be able to talk to or interact with the same system at Bank B
or Linder see is there any way to sort of or is this all gonna be within each
company within each Bank within each credit card company yeah as far as I
can't unfortunately don't know that's okay I can't speak to that because I
don't know if there are interoperability standards being established out there I
did I know of there aren't there there could be you know but I've not been told
that there are ok good interesting to find out what else do we know if any so
also so now mostly we've been talking about customer-facing applications for
AI and machine learning well within a company you can also use AI and machine
learning to call data to produce reports to to produce information that helps the
bank itself become more efficient so across it between the various business
lines so that sort of edges into sort of like data analytics beta and what what
customers and companies are doing with the financial institution exactly within
the company itself so that today that's of course done through mostly through
human effort which is arduous takes a lot of time this this way you send out a
script that looks across for similar data across systems and complain you can
compile reports based on that okay time frame on this next year or two that
people will start you know customers will start seeing these kinds of chat
BOTS and interactions and upsells and everything else I had two different
experts one from Deloitte and another one from a AI services company the AI
services company believed that it was going to be within the next year that
you're gonna see more production systems in fact probably this year they're gonna
start 2019 right Boyd thought that was a little more a little too aggressive
probably over the next one to three years okay which is gonna start so
sometime between this year and 2022 yeah this will be rolled out probably across
most of the India to see more production systems yeah definitely okay last
thoughts for let you go um let's see customer relationship management got
into regulatory compliance oh not natural language processing so that was
was one other area I want to just touch on quickly so these this this AI
technology is able to process your your voice on a system determine so if you're
like on the on a mobile phone and right okay we've all had experiences with that
I mean you call them good not so good it should improve over the next year or so
because these are getting better the other thing it can do is natural
language generation so it can generate natural language and write in plain
language for customers to understand I do have to wonder if at some point this
is all gonna get tied in with like Alexa or Siri Siri raise my spending limit how
could it you know or well I mean if you think about it if you could tie it in
with Alexa then you could buy things and and boost your spending limits and put
it on your credit card all with the sound of voice from home right to go
wrong okay Lucas thanks for the for the update obviously more to come on yeah
we'll we'll check back with you later in the year and see if these things are
actually rolling out for AI financial services Lucas and me that's wrap