How Artificial Intelligence will continue to change banking

AI is slated to change everything in the history of the world. A lot more than electricity, which is a tall order even for the most advanced of technologies. It is no secret that we are now living in the AI age. Don’t believe it? Look around and you’ll start to notice how AI intensive modern life has become.

Did you speak to Siri or Alexa today morning? Perhaps you recently interacted with a business that makes use of facial recognition technology? And you must have used your credit card to pay for something in the last 24 hours, right? Or added that item to cart recommended to you on Amazon?

Do you see it now? AI is all around us. All of these day to day processes that we take for granted are underpinned by data and AI. And AI isn’t just infiltrating day to day activities and tasks. It is transforming entire industries and fields and one of the most affected by AI is the field of banking.

Banks have always been ready and willing to jump on the newest technological trends- just as long as they can be used to make front and back operations more efficient, which is exactly what AI promises to do. Large financial organizations especially rely on AI to stay ahead of the competition, provide greater customer experience, as well as provide services that are more relevant to customers.

It is AI that allows your credit card company to determine, swiftly and in seconds, whether your last transaction fits your spending and isn’t in fact fraudulent. Mastercard, for instance, utilizes AI algorithms to assess billions of transactions a year, which is something that the best books on Artificial Intelligence in 2020 will reveal (great list on this site).

What about bankers’ jobs?

As machine learning continues to advance, AI will cause some considerable changes especially in regards to people’s jobs. This is because as machines continue to become more intelligent, it allows them to carry out more tasks a lot more efficiently, causing a rise in automation across almost all industries including banking.

With this rise in automation, it is only natural for people to worry about AI’s impact on human jobs. It is crucial to note that while there is no doubt that automation will cause many jobs to be displaced, it will also pave the way for the creation of many jobs; jobs that value our uniquely hard-to-teach human capabilities such as empathy and creativity.

So how will artificial intelligence continue to change banking?

Efficient fraud detection

Banks have been using AI to detect fraud for a while now but as AI continues to make strides, the future of fraud detection looks even brighter. Online banking has changed the way people bank today for the better. However, it has also brought major security concerns.

Banks are now using AI to analyze how and where customers use their banking apps, as well as scrutinize the typical behaviors that their customers display when interacting with these banking apps. They do so in an effort to examine patterns and detect any possible anomalies and possible instances of fraud taking place.

Thanks to such AI capabilities, banks are now able to actively monitor fraud in real-time, which goes a long way in saving its customers money through such efficient fraud detection methods. This added layer of fraud protection is just another way that banks are providing great service to their customers.

Enhancing customer services intelligently

AI is also being used by banks to improve customer and baking experiences. Banks are using AI to interact with their customers and help them reach their financial objectives. Currently, the best banks are already using chatbots to assist customers with an array of tasks.

These chatbots can engage and interact with customers 24/7, which has done away with traditional 9-5 banking hours. For banks that serve customers all over the world, this has become crucial as it allows banks to offer customers personalized assistance, advice, guidance, or individual recommendations instead of grouping all customers in one broad classification or category.

AI for reviewing important documents

Banks are also investing heavily in technology that can help them reduce legal mistakes using a contract intelligence chatbot. The contract intelligent chatbot or COiN is designed to go through legal documents extracting vital data points and clauses.

This is a job that was once strictly reserved by lawyers. Manual review of commercial credit agreements would take hours to days. However, the contract intelligent chatbot can review thousands of agreements in a matter of seconds, which has eliminated the possibility of mistakes while making such processes more efficient than ever.

Human error is one of the leading causes of data breaches and unfortunately, such errors are costly yet easily avoidable. AI is so much better at handling and going through structured data, which helps to bring down the error rates to a minimum. Through automation, banks are now able to reduce the time, effort, and money spent on such time-consuming processes.

Final Thoughts

The robots really are taking over. It used to be that to incorporate AI into a business, one would need costly technology and a huge team of in-house programmers and data scientists. Things are completely different now and industries all over the world are looking for ways on how they can introduce AI into their systems to make things more efficient.

Banking is one such industry that is undergoing an AI revolution. Banks have always been at the forefront of making use of new technology that can assist with both the front and back of the house operations and AI is no different.

As if you need any more evidence that AI really is the future of the baking industry, let’s pay attention to one simple but important fact: AI is the foundation on which so many important banking trends have been built. What this means is that without AI, your favorite banking chatbot, virtual reality, facial recognition just to name a few, would not be a reality.