How AI Is Empowering The Banking Industry

Chat GPT, LaMDA, BERT, GPT-4 and Open AI are all terms that we hear of everyday when talking about Artificial Intelligence. Over the better part of 2023, Artificial Intelligence has dominated technology talks in multiple industry with big tech companies coming up with different AI models that they have offered for customers’ use.

The Business and Financial Services Industry (BFSI) can also benefit from the advantage of AI. At the dx5 Africa Fintech Summit, the CEO of Pathways Technologies, Joel Onditi, gave a presentation on what needs to be done to help banks and fintechs leverage on the AI advantage.

Joel talked about KYC details and how many people traditionally look at KYC as only important for regulators, when they also need to use the KYC details to better understand their customers and hence serve them better. This is an example of how AI can be used to better serve the customers as AI models will help you sort out KYC details and develop services and products based on what the customers want.

The Pathways Technologies boss defines AI as a theory that explains how machines do what human beings used to do. He went further to list examples of how banks can leverage on AI to help them deliver better services to their customers.

• AI Driven Customer Service – A lot of banks and fintechs already use AI chatbots to communicate with their customers but there’s more that needs to be done. These chatbots can be taken to the next level and customers can actually enjoy using them and feel like they are talking to an actual human being.
• Personalized Marketing – When marketing new products and services to your customers it is key to ensure that you are only marketing to the customers that need the specific product or service. AI will help you understand that customer.
• Risk assessment and credit scoring – The Banking Industry is all about assessing risk and assessing customers who come in looking for credits. With AI this can be easier for the banks as they would understand the customer more and get to avoid risk.
• Cybersecurity – For any bank that is moving to the cloud or already has moved to the cloud, cybersecurity is a very important matter. With AI it helps the bank to be more cyber secure as it can see attackers before they get into the system as well as come up with quick counter-defense systems to avoid hacking and ransomwares.
• Algorithmic Trading – AI can also be helpful in analyzing trends  and providing advisory to the bank without ever having to interact with a human being.
• Sentimental Analysis – Through the growth of social media, AI can also help in analyzing the sentiment of the customer and understand what to best serve to the customer and what new products to advertise to them.

Joel Onditi also talked about AI ethics which he termed as the biggest part of AI.