Heavily regulated, customer-centric and reliant on levels of human involvement and manual processes, financial services are ripe for automation through artificial intelligence (AI). However, these same characteristics reveal the risks that AI poses to this sector. Business technology leaders in financial services are therefore carefully navigating the AI path. But as they reveal, it’s a road they must tread with caution.
AI dominates the discourse and headlines, but financial services technology leaders know there is plenty of substance amid the noise. “A lot of tools go into a hype cycle and then you come out a little dismayed, but there’s a difference here,” says Dominic Cugini, chief transformation officer at KeyBank. “We see how quickly this technology is evolving, so it will experience a very different hype cycle.”
AI is not the future of financial services, it is the present. Genpact, a leading business and technology services company that helps banks such as JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, is already using AI. “She’s really good at summarizing, filling in the blanks and connecting the dots. Generative AI is therefore fit for purpose,” says Brian Baral, Global Head of Risk at Genpact. “We were able to take a leap forward and do in a few months what took three years, but data is essential. Banks must prepare to take the plunge.”
Recognizing the recent history of disruption in financial services, the industry’s technology leaders are already seeking opportunities in AI. “Generative AI is opening a new era of exploration in IT,” says Frank Schmidt, CTO of insurance company Gen Re. Cugini at KeyBank agrees and adds that exploration must include a cross-functional team from all areas of the business, not just IT. “We also brought in experts from Microsoft and Google to really understand what AI means for our industry.” Schmidt sees AI as having potential in automating processes, particularly for underwriting submissions. “AI will play a role in this workflow and in classifying information,” he says.
Tiago Azevedo, CIO of Boston-based low-code development platform OutSystems, agrees. “In order to achieve significant productivity through AI, we need to rethink workflows,” he says. “And I expect AI to become composable so it can play different roles in the organization.” To achieve this, financial services organizations will need much more modular processes.
Just as AI adoption requires the involvement of all parts of the business, so does the ethical mandate of financial services organizations and their use of generative AI. “We created an AI ethics committee made up of the legal, compliance, technology and cybersecurity teams,” says Cugini.
