Once the stuff of science fiction, artificial intelligence (AI) has moved quietly into the mainstream and is transforming the financial services industry. Fundamentally, AI involves the development of computing systems that are able to engage in human-like thought processes, such as learning, reasoning and self-correction. The technology drastically improves the outcomes, however, by applying methods derived from aspects of human intelligence at a beyond-human scale.
The potential benefits of harnessing and perfecting artificial intelligence are almost unfathomable. As Stephen Hawking and colleagues wrote in an article for the Independent: “…everything that civilisation has to offer is a product of human intelligence. We cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools that AI may provide, but the eradication of war, disease, and poverty would be high on anyone’s list. Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history.”
The application of AI in financial services could be particularly game-changing. From automated credit scoring to digital financial assistants and fast, accurate expense reporting, there are numerous ways in which machine learning is already having an impact on organisational process and customer journey.
And it’s big business: 550 start-ups across the world that utilised AI as a core part of their product offering raised $5bn in funding in 2016. It is also expected to add $814bn to the UK’s economy by 2035.
While the US initially led the way in the development of AI, its share has reduced over the past few years. Non-US deal share increased from 21% in 2012 to nearly 40% in 2016.
It is clear, however, that investment in safeguarding this technology is equally important. Earlier this year, US-based Knight Foundation, LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman and others set up a $27m fund to support global research into the ethics and governance surrounding artificial intelligence.
Thanks to the power of AI technologies being able to learn without being explicitly programmed, this caution is well-founded. But this characteristic also provides financial services firms with smart processing power – thanks to neutral networks, Big Data analytics and evolutionary algorithms – to crunch deeper, more varied datasets than ever before.
It is perhaps inevitable, therefore, that AI is rapidly being built into a range of processes across the financial services industry – from automated customer support to cybersecurity, insurance and predictive analysis, as well as in the creation of automated virtual financial assistants.
AI tools are empowering corporates by learning and monitoring customers’ behavioural patterns, identifying signs of fraud and detecting cybersecurity breaches in a fraction of the time that it would take humans to perform the same analysis. And in such a high-tech field, it is no surprise that innovation is constant, particularly in the battle to keep pace with fraudsters.
Barac, for instance – a graduate from the London Barclays Accelerator – promises to ‘detect very early signs of possible attack, predict a threat and react in real-time using an advanced AI’. Its platform analyses and transforms real-time data into actionable business results through the combination of big data, data science and predictive analysis.
It is this ability for AI to take on some of the fraud prevention and cybersecurity load that is of particular value, as it means analysts are free to spend more time searching for that ‘needle in a haystack’.
