How Artificial Intelligence (AI) Is Changing Banking

Artificial intelligence (AI) serves up a number of assets and benefits for many industries. AI is one of the most discussed topics today, from chatbots to Siri and Alexa. And AI is not a trend. Research has shown that the number of consumers using AI powered virtual assistants will be in the billions in the coming years.

There are tons of applications for artificial intelligence available, especially when it comes to banking. The banking industry has been able to utilize a variety of AI technology to streamline processes, enhance security, and improve the customer experience. AI may also be reshaping how banking is done in the not so distant future.

“In fact, many banks are planning to deploy solutions enabled by AI: 75% of respondents at banks with over $100 billion in assets say they’re currently implementing AI strategies, compared with 46% at banks with less than $100 billion in assets, per a UBS Evidence Lab report seen by Business Insider Intelligence,” Eleni Digalaki of Business Insider explained.

Let’s take a closer look at how artificial intelligence is changing banking today and in the future.

AI Identity Verification

The ability to identify people quickly and accurately is an important part of banking. This ensures customers are not at risk for security breaches or fraud. And AI can help make identity verification simple for banking.

For instance, banks can use artificially intelligent identity verification to identify customers and their documents accurately. It can even be done via mobile device. There are digital identity solutions that uses a banking customers phone to take photos of themselves and their documents, upload to the banking platform, and get verified in minutes.

Mitigating Fraud Via AI Pattern Recognition

To identify fraud, a person will need to find a trail of documents, and sift through those documents. This sounds easy, but there could be hundreds to thousands of documents to go over in order to find a pattern that can be investigated further. Instead of an entire team of banking officials doing this task, artificial intelligence can do it faster and to a higher degree of success.

Did you know cybercrime has a $600 billion annual global economic price tag for banks and companies? Fighting fraud through AI pattern recognition has been gaining ground on cyber security threats lately. Your customers will like this too, since legitimate activity will not be flagged as fraud as often either. Not a bad banking benefits when it comes to AI.

Streamline Banking Processes

There are plenty of menial tasks involved in day-to-day banking activity. The high volume and low value processes that need to be done can be time consuming, inefficient, and slow the entire bank or financial institution down. However, AI can take on many of those tasks and streamline processes like no other business application can.

And artificial intelligent processes will continue to be streamlined until they are at the most efficient point. This is because AI application learn over time. Did you know that nearly 2 million banking requests were handled by AI bots in 2017? They essentially did the work of 50 full-time employees. That’s powerful stuff.

Automated Banking Customer Service

Customer service is essential to banking, but sometimes banks and financial institutions miss the mark. Unless they are using AI to interact with customers daily. Utilizing natural language processing, banks employ AI chatbots to help customers online. The bots are so human-like in the interaction, most people don’t even know they are talking to a chatbot.

The use of automated customer service in banking also frees up employees to do more challenging tasks AI may not be of use. This could streamline more processes and create an efficient and more productive working environment. AI chatbots also cut down on payroll, since you don’t need as big of a call center team.

In Conclusion . . .

Artificial intelligence is a technology in use across multiple industries. There are so many applications for AI, some industries use one or two aspects while other industries use nearly all of AI. Banking has become pretty dependent on artificial intelligence to increase customer satisfaction, improve banking processes, and cut costs. AI has really reshaped banking in a lot of ways.

Fintech is also ushering in more technology that support or compliments AI, like blockchain. Blockchain, like AI, will also create more streamlined banking processes, enhanced security, and more. The future of banking and finance is certainly exciting to think about. What type of technology are you using in your banking processes? What’s working? And what’s not? We want to hear from you.