Moving a Step Closer towards Autonomous Banking

The Infosys Finacle – Efma report on retail banking mentions that 53% of the banks feel that pervasive automation will be one of the key drivers for digital transformation in the coming year. While this makes a good case on behalf of automation, the foremost question on everyone’s mind at the moment is, how are technologies like automation along with artificial intelligence, will impact the workforce.

This new wave of automation will free up the workforce from mundane and repetitive tasks, and enable them to focus on adding innovations to the business value chain. The first wave of automation belonged to simple workflow automation, with flexible rule-based processing that spanned across multiple departments. Next was robotic automation for some applications that were part of a larger process, and this needed some amount of human support. With these automation systems in place, a lot of the tedious business processes within an organization were streamlined, and the amount of busy work for the workforce was reduced. This in turn resulted in an improvement in efficiency and performance and brought down staffing issues and expenses.

Now that the processes were streamlined and human intervention was reduced, the next wave is the era of self-learning machines. These machines learn automatically as they execute processes and modify business rules to become smarter. As these machines learn and make processes more efficient, they enable businesses to provide a more consistent experience to their customers. Cognitive machines that can learn and act are already implemented in the financial services sector to provide financial advice and security against fraud. With time, these cognitive machines will leverage the data gathered from customers to provide them with financial advice and help banks to innovate their value chain.

Automation will not be limited to just within the organization, but in this open ecosystem banks will use blockchain as an enabler for inter-organizational automation. This will be the driver for banks to act as a value aggregator for the consumers and their partners. 2017 will be the year where machines and humans will work in tandem for better business outcomes.

AI – Your Sci-fi Movie Imagination is Turning into a Reality

Artificial intelligence (AI) is going to become the competitive advantage for banks in the future. In fact, a majority of banks feel that AI is going to have a significant impact in the coming year as a disruptive technology. Progressive banks are getting on board the AI train, and now intelligent digital assistants are omnipresent in banking – from payments, to money management, and financial advice as well. While progressive and challenger banks are already off the starting block, it is expected that their traditional counterparts will soon follow suit.
AI will not only transform the front end, customer facing technology, but also the back end technology platforms. On the front end, banking will transform by implementing an AI platform that uses machine learning; digitally savvy customers will be treated to a differentiated customer experience that’ll get better, the more they interact with the bank on different platforms. In terms of internal processes, banks will drive efficiency with the automation and innovation brought in by these self-learning platforms. Employees will be freed up from doing mundane tasks to focus more on product/service innovation.
As there are advances in technology, there is an increase in the number of attacks on customer data. AI has stepped up to the plate in the area of banking security as well. Progressive banks have already interweaved AI into their security framework that uses machine learning to upgrade the security measures in real-time; this provides banks with a sizable protection from theft and fraud. While AI is going to be one amongst the game-changing technologies for 2017, banks will need to understand that the success driven by AI depends on the adroit execution of digital technologies, such as bid data, automation, and cloud to name a few. Banks will be looking to integrate AI into their omni channel strategy to create more conversational interfaces for their customers; it won’t be a far stretch of the imagination to say that 2017 might just be the year for intelligent robo advisors for all your financial queries.