Ever since AlphaGo, DeepMind’s created computer program, defeated Lee Sedol, a professional GO player, two years ago, the use of artificial intelligence has increased significantly.
Currently, technology systems are utilizing machine learning to undertake various tasks such as monitoring energy systems, diagnose severe medical conditions and control distribution centers.
Even so, voice-activated digital assistants presently being unveiled by leading tech companies are powered by an area of AI called natural language processing.
With the banking industry expediting the adoption of AI in recent years, more experiments have shifted into production.
In fact, banks are using artificial intelligence technology to provide impressive personalized banking experiences to their customers as well as assisting their staff in making better decisions.
Chatbot marks AI’s initial deployment into the banking industry. This technology allows customers to ask or text questions through their smartphones.
As a result, a chatbot saves them a significant amount of time that would have been used to find complex product terms on a website, get passed around a call center or go physically to a bank.
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Chatbot Use in the Banking Sector
Virtual Banker, National Australia Bank’s chatbot, can identify about 13,000 variations out of 200 common queries from its business banking customers.
On the other hand, UBank, NAB’s digital bank, has developed RoboChat in conjunction with Watson to respond to home loan questions.
In January, Commonwealth Bank unveiled a chatbot dubbed Ceba, which is expected to understand 500,000 ways that customers could ask for 500 distinct banking activities by the end of the year.
CUA, the nation’s leading credit union, is also piloting a chatbot in partnership with ASX-listed Flamingo.
Also, ANZBanking Group has come up with biometric voice capability through its collaboration with Nuance, a technology company, to help customers to access banking services by talking to the application.
As AI is being leveraged to lift productivity through big data, Westpac Banking Corp is collaborating with Hyper Anna, whose technology utilizes AI to carry out data visualization and analytics.
With Australia’s banks preparing to launch AI more widely, three large banks are currently holding talks with Personetics, Israeli-based AI intelligence fintech.
According to Ian Pollari, the global co-head of KPMG, the global expansion of fintech companies such as Personetics shows the increasing level of interest in AI by banks.
Personetics boasts a cognitive banking brain with the ability to learn about customer activity and behavior.
The software is linked to data sources within a bank, which create profiles or every customer using six months’ worth of data.
With this technology, anticipating customer’s financial requirements becomes easy.
Ethics Concerns
Bearing in mind the strict regulations that govern financial services, introducing AI in banking will be met by a heavy consideration of legal and ethics liability.
Although using a chatbot to assist customers in making their payments may be uncontroversial for the most part, the adoption of AI to conduct critical regulatory duties or steer investment decisions could be a daunting task.
To solve this challenge, human bankers will first need to explain how AI makes decisions, interrogate algorithms and take responsibility for AI decisions.
Source AFR
