Author: Bálint Bakó, Project Manager at ApPello AI Development.
Around a week ago I had a chance to participate and speak about AI at the 12th Global Banking Innovation Virtual Forum & Expo organized by Uniglobal. Bankers, FinTech professionals, legislators and executives from the financial sector attended the event from all over the world and presented leading banks case studies about digitalization and the world’s most innovative FinTech solutions to date.
The participants had a chance to get a holistic insight of the ongoing digital transformation of the financial sector, since the background of the panelists covered literally the entire financial ecosystem, speakers were not only from regulators but IT solution companies as well.
It is not a surprise that the most mentioned buzzwords were digital transformation, online and mobile banking, AI and machine learning. I truly believe that these are the key areas that will drive the modernization of the banking sector in the next couple of year, however the transformation has already started. The chart from the risk assessment report of EBA shows that the banking sector is gradually catching-up with the implementation of new technologies:
Risk assessment of the European Banking System, December 2020, European Banking Authority
The pandemic has accelerated the digital transformation plans of the financial institutions. They have invested a huge amount of money to build up their digital channels, in order to keep their existing clients and acquire new prospects. As demand grows towards new AI driven applications and solutions, so does for new regulatory framework. In the conference regulators shared the same view and explained that there is an upcoming proposal in 2021 that will aim to provide some guidance around AI based systems, ensuring there is a human oversight on limitations of AI (e.g.: explainability and ethics). In the meantime, speakers from FinTechs and IT companies showed their solutions how to automate and simplify lending processes, engage and keep your customers.
Banks also shared their experiences and results of their newly implemented mobile and online applications and it had put them in a very unique position to capitalize on the data that they are seeing from their digital channels, so no doubt that data will be the blood and AI is the heart of the upcoming digitization.
From ApPello I had the honor and privilege to talk about the benefits and the implementation challenges that AI can bring to the banking sector.
- At the very beginning of my presentation, I have showed the audience the key drivers that pushes banks to adopt AI in their processes. Amongst them are the pandemic, increasing competition, greater profit margins and changing demography.
- I have also talked about the most commonly used AI use cases that are already tested and implemented by many banks across Europe and classified by banking processes.
- Last but not least I have walked the audience through one our successful POC testing for Credit Scoring.
As a take away of the conference: we see a huge competition on the financial market, struggle to improve profit margins and catching-up with the needs of new generations, in order to fulfill all this requirements banks must adopt new technologies, such as AI, cloud services, digital wallets and must strengthen their end-to-end digital lending processes.