Denmark-based Danske Bank is currently collaborating with IBM Watson to apply machine learning in predicting and fixing IT issues before they affect customers.
IT outages frequently cause downtime for numerous online banking systems and mobile banking applications.
These issues put the reputation of banks at risk, especially amongst customers.
Customers post their complaints on Twitter, especially after a given banking system goes offline.
In the meantime, banking institutions are closing down some of their branches, where their customers can usually go and receive the desired services as a digital banking alternative.
As such, they may soon become fed up with such issues and opt for another bank.
According to Danske Bank, the purpose of its AI project with IBM is “to be one step ahead and avoid incidents which affect the customers negatively.”
The Danish bank is utilizing the Predictive Insights of IBM, which is now working on to train it on how to identify problems.
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Danske Bank’s co-head of IT operations Ona Juodkiene, claims: “It takes time and talented IT professionals to tailor and adjust and integrate these systems into the organization’s IT environment.
But when you invest in this, it makes it possible to create a culture across the organization.
Already now, we see that some employees, who might have been a little skeptical initially, have had what we call an AI moment, where they really see the value for both the customers and themselves in their daily work.”
However, customers are not the only ones who are bothered by the large number of service outages in the digital banking space, as regulators also share the same concern.
She said that Danske Bank plans to be the first in using artificial intelligence (AI) in all its operations.
The subsequent step will include the introduction of a virtual agent in the form of IBM Watson’s chatbot in a bid to deal with internal user queries as a way of supplementing human assistance at the Group IT service desk.
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“It is important for us to adopt this technology relatively early in time because it allows us to be a first-mover when it comes to achieving cognitive technology expertise in the organisation,” she says.
“We could also choose to say that we would wait a little bit until artificial intelligence expertise is more widely available and for the technology to mature.
This might be less time-consuming in relation to a specific task, but it would entail a huge risk that we as a company might not be able to catch up with the early adopters.”
In November 2018, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) revealed in its report that nearly 600 technology issues were reported to the UK regulator between September 2018 and October 2017.
The figure marked a 138 percent increment in the preceding year, with the primary cause being malfunctioned IT changeovers.
Founded back in October 1871, Danske Bank is a Danish bank located in Copenhagen.
The bank is the most prominent banking institution in all of Denmark and one of the leading retail banks in the Northern part of Europe with more than 5 million retail customers.
